A century ago today, a small central-European country that no longer exists declared war on an even smaller country that has only in the past few decades popped back into being, spiraling the world into war, changing the face of the globe forever and ultimately claiming the lives of about 50 Warren County men.

It would be three more years until the United States entered The Great War, when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on July 28, 1814.

William Weems Allein of Vicksburg was just 13 when the war broke out, and his brother Henry was but 18.

It’s unlikely they or any of the other 1,549 men from Warren County who served in the war had ever heard much of Serbia — a landlocked kingdom about the size of Mississippi — in 1914, but the Allein brothers and 50 others would give their lives to defend it and its allies.

The number of World War I dead is contradictory. A monument in the rose garden on Monroe Street lists 45 men who gave their lives during the war. Wartime records at the Old Court House Museum list 52.

The monument depicts a soldier, thought to be William Allein, and a sailor, thought to be W.H. Gifford, the first Warren County man killed in the war.

Gifford died Dec. 6, 1917, when a German torpedo sank the USS Jacob Jones.

Pvt. William Allein, 17, met his fate Oct. 6, 1918, during an American charge near Exermont, France. A film crew recorded some of the battle, and shells can be seen falling into the small village before doughboys clad in heavy wool uniforms and coats come sprinting though the streets.

“He was killed instantly by a bursting shell, which also severely wounded Cpl. Francis of the same gun-crew, which was operating the one-pounder,” Chaplain Oliver J. Stuart of the Fifth Field Artillery wrote to Allein’s family on Jan. 9, 1919, in a handwritten letter that is part of the Old Court House Museum collection. “Fragments of the shell got him in the head and breast, so he probably never knew anything had hit him.”

Just 22 days later, his brother, Lt. Henry Cook Allein was shot down over Chaumont, about 100 miles south of Exermont.

Eugene Hardy, who after the war was a farmer in Lowndes County, blamed himself for Henry’s death.

“Perhaps this might have been different had I not been sent to the hospital with pneumonia as we were in the same flight and always tried to watch out for each other in an attack,” he wrote to Henry’s parents, Thomas H. and Fannie Allein in 1919.

Allein Post No. 3 of the American Legion was named in the brothers’ honor in 1920.