World War I commonly brings to mind scenes of Europe in conflict—the first Battle of the Marne, the siege of Verdun, and the bloody struggle of The Somme, as well as the brutal slog of trench warfare on the Western Front.
But the first bullet of the war in late July 1914 wasn’t actually fired in Europe. Instead, as Byron Farwell notes in his book The Great War in Africa, 1914-1918, it was a shot taken by an African soldier in a British uniform at German colonial forces in what is now Togo in West Africa, which back then was a part of Germany’s vast empire in Africa.