Dutch aircraft designer Anton Fokker, working for the Germans, vastly improves the Roland Garros technique for firing machine guns through the propellers of fighter planes

The Germans make their first effective use of a new weapon, the flame thrower, in an attack on the British in the second batte of Ypres

The emperor Nicholas II moves to military HQ to take personal command of the Russian armies

The British use chlorine gas for the first time in an attack on Loos, but in places it is blown back over the British lines when the wind changes

French and British troops land at Salonika and push north to relieve Serbia

Austria-Hungary renews its attack on Serbia, and its troops capture Belgrade

The English nurse Edith Cavell is court-martialled and executed by German forces in Belgium

The Serbian army flees, abandoning Serbia to Austrian and Bulgarian invaders

German armies make sufficient advances to drive the Russians out of Poland

from December - the 225-horsepower Eagle, the first of many Rolls-Royce aero-engines, is used to power British bombers

Wartime income tax soars in Britain to an unprecedented 30%

New Zealand surgeon Harold Gillies sets up a plastic surgery unit at Aldershot, a British military base

The opera Goyescas, by Spanish composer Enrique Granados, has its premiere in New York

Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg found the radical Spartacus League, named after the gladiator

Enrique Granados, on the last leg of his return from New York, is one of many civilians to die when the Sussex is torpedoed by a U-boat in the English Channel

The occupation of the General Post Office in Dublin marks the beginning of the Easter Rising

The rebel leader Patrick Pearse stands under the portico of Dublin's General Post Office to announce the birth of the Irish republic

Roger Casement is arrested after returning secretly to Ireland three days before the Easter Rising

Eamon de Valera comes to prominence as one of the republican leaders in the Easter Rising

Britain and France sign the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, dividing up spheres of influence in the Middle East

The Villa Schwob is completed, the last house designed by Le Corbusier in La Chaux-de-Fonds and one of the first in the world to use reinforced concrete

The success of Jenufa in Prague finally brings international recognition to Leos Janacek, already in his sixties

Patrick Pearse and his fellow Irish rebel James Connolly are executed by firing squad

Manuel de Falla completes his piece for piano and orchestra, Nights in the Gardens of Spain

"If You Were the Only Girl in the World" features in the London musical The Bing Boys are Here