On Thursday, January 1, 1914, the front page of the Yorkshire Observer morning newspaper, devoted to church notices and public announcements, carried a message from Bradford’s Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress.

Alderman and Mrs John Arnold wished the citizens of Bradford “a prosperous new year”.

Elsewhere, Francis Laidler’s fifth pantomime, Aladdin, was advertised at Leeds’ Theatre Royal. Bradford’s Theatre Royal was staging Dick Whittington and His Cat.

In a letter to the editor, industrialist and former Liberal MP Sir John Brunner called for retrenchment in taxation by cutting back on “unproductive expenditure and waste upon armaments”.

Sir John called upon Liberal associations throughout the country to pass resolutions before the end of January in favour of reductions in arms spending, to send a message to Herbert Asquith’s Liberal Party Government before the military and naval estimates for 1915 had been finally settled.

Britain and Germany had been building bigger and more powerful warships. Fearing German expansionism, Britain’s policy was to maintain a 60 per cent superiority in the numbers of the Royal Navy’s capital ships.

The same day the Yorkshire Observer’s London correspondent wired a prophetic little piece about increased army recruitment in Russia and Austria in response to political tensions between Russia, Germany and Turkey.

Under the headline ‘Dark clouds in the near east’ the correspondent wrote: “The crisis on this occasion is undoubtedly in the Near East.

“St Petersburg is determined to dislodge the Germans from the position they have acquired in Constantinople, but the task is going to be one of extreme difficulty, and there is little doubt that the strain upon the international situation will become very severe in the first few weeks of the new year.”

Between 1911 and 1913 there had been four small wars in South East Europe involving Italy, Turkey, Bulgaria, Rumania and Serbia.

Peace of a sort had been brokered by the bigger powers – but like the over-heated calm before a storm, people feared a bomb or a bullet that would spark off a greater conflagration.

The assassination by Serbian nationalists of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, also killed Europe’s fragile peace.

Weeks later five European empires – Britain, Germany, Russia (which included Poland), Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman (Turkey) – were at war with one another, drawn in by a network of diplomatic alliances.

The oldest of these, the Treaty of London, dated back to 1839.

By this the United Kingdom, which included all of the island of Ireland, guaranteed to defend the neutrality of Belgium.

So when Germany invaded Belgium on August 4, 1914, Britain went to war.

Britain and her colonies and dominions including Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and South Africa, lined up with France, Russia, Japan, later Italy, and from April 1917, the United States.

Austria-Hungary, Germany and Ottoman Turkey (which included Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula), and Bulgaria, otherwise known as the Central Powers, were the enemy.

Scraps of paper governing the protocols of a tangled web of alliances, created to avoid a major European war, lit the gunpowder trail which ignited a world war in two parts – from 1914 to 1918 and from 1939 to 1945.