To the Dardanelles! The Entente Allies successfully capture their objective and plant their flags in this boy's 1915 war game, as they did not in life, neither in the naval campaign, nor in the invasion of the Gallipoli peninsula.
Image text: Aux Dardanelles; Victoire; Vive les AlliésLogo and number: ACA 2131Reverse:Artige - Fabricant 16, Faub. St. Denis Paris Visé Paris N. au verso. Fabrication Française - Marque A.C.A
Headstone of an unknown soldier of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, Delville Wood Cemetery. Union of South Africa troops began the assault at Delville Wood on July 15, 1916. It was finally taken in September. On the headstone is superimposed the poem 'To My Daughter Betty, the Gift of God' by Lieutenant Tom Kettle of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, killed in action on September 9, 1916 at Guillemont, France, in the Battle of the Somme. He has no known grave. © 2013 John M. Shea
Image text: To My Daughter Betty, the Gift of GodIn wiser days, my darling rosebud, blownTo beauty proud as was your mother's prime,In that desired, delayed, incredible time,You'll ask why I abandoned you, my own,And the dear heart that was your baby throne,To dice with death. And oh! they'll give you rhymeAnd reason: some will call the thing sublime,And some decry it in a knowing tone.So here, while the mad guns curse overhead,And tired men sigh with mud and couch and floor,Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,But for a dream, born in a herdsman's shed,And for the secret Scripture of the poor.— Tom KettleIn the field, before Guillemont, Somme, 4 September 1916
Headstones at La Nécropole Nationale de Pontavert. The cemetery contains the remains of 6,815 soldiers, 67 of them British, 54 Russian, and the remainder French. Of the total, 1,364 are entombed in the ossuary. © 2014 by John M. Shea
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Northern detail showing Operation Georgette, the Lys Offensive, from a map of the 1918 German offensives on the Western Front from The Memoirs of Marshall Foch by Marshall Ferdinand Foch. The white area north of the German advance shows the British strategic retreats of April 15/16 and April 27 that shortened the line of the Ypres salient. © 1931 by Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc.
Image text: German OffensivesOf Mar. 21 (Picardy)Of May 27 (Aisne-Marne)Of July 15 (Champagne-Marne)Of Apr. 9 (Flanders)Of June 9 (Compiegne)Front and situation of the German Armies March 20, 1918 (on the eve of the offensive)Front at the end of the offensiveScale of miles
"Our first sight of it was from the sea on the day of the landing. It looked wild country. Like some part of New Zealand really. We didn't land until three in the afternoon. Ashore, it was frightful. Terrible. I've never seen anything like that before. We followed the fighting, until we were halfway up Walker's Ridge. I saw men with all kinds of wounds. Arms off. Legs off. All we could do was bandage them up as best we could and get them back to the beach. That was our main job, getting casualties back to the beach. It was a problem sorting out the living from the dead. We looked at each man fairly closely. When they could walk there wasn't any trouble. Stretcher-bearers took away the severely wounded. All we could do was bandage them up and give morphia pills to ease their suffering. Some died on the way back to the beach. They had to sort things out back there." ((1), more)
"It appeared that everything claimed on the previous day was true, and that the City of Dublin was entirely in the hands of the Volunteers. They had taken and sacked Jacob's Biscuit Factory, and had converted it into a fort which they held. They had the Post Office, and were [building] baricades around it ten feet high with sandbags, cases, wire entanglements. They had pushed out all the windows and sandbagged them to half their height, while cart-loads of food, vegetables and ammunition were going in continually. They had dug trenches and were laying siege to one of the city barracks." ((2), more)
"Except for bureaucratic scuffling, most of the fighting associated with the Nivelle offensive had ended by April 25, and a sense of failure swept over the army and the government. Between April 16 and 25 the French suffered—according to estimates by French historical services—134,000 casualties on the Aisne, including 30,000 killed, 100,000 wounded, and 4,000 captured. Though more soldiers had died in Joffre's offensives in 1915, the casualties in Nivelle's offensive occurred over a relatively brief period and exceeded those of any month since November 1914." ((3), more)
"Beginning on the night of April 18 [1918], four divisions in the [French Army Detachment of the North] entered the front lines in the Mount Kemmel sector, north of the Hazebrouck salient. Although the Flanders front remained quiet after the eighteenth, the enemy launched a strong attack on April 25, striking the newly formed Army Detachment and the British to its north. Although some soldiers fought very well, the French lost Mount Kemmel, and the British scathingly criticized them for losing that important observation point. After an attempt to regain Kemmel the following day failed, British criticism of their ally escalated." ((4), more)
(1) Excerpt from George Skerret's account of the landing of the New Zealand Otago Battalion on Gallipoli on April 25, 1915, the first day of the Gallipoli campaign. Skerret was a member of the medical corps. The Australians landed in the morning, followed by the New Zealanders later in the day. The beach became known as Anzac Cove after the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps.
Voices of Gallipoli by Maurice Shadbolt, pp. 50, 51, copyright © 1988 Maurice Shadbolt, publisher: Hodder and Stoughton, publication date: 1988
(2) Excerpt from his account of the second day of the Irish Easter Rising, Tuesday, April 25, 1915, by Irish poet and novelist James Stephens who was in Dublin throughout the insurrection. He went to work assuming the rebellion was over. One focus of his chapter for the day is 'rumour.' Rumor had it that Germans had landed weapons, which they had tried to do, and that German troops and Irish-American troops under German officers had landed, which they had not. Rumor had it that 8,000 British troops had landed, and indeed units were being moved from elsewhere in Ireland and from England to Dublin. There were no papers from the outside world. Many people on the streets were more sympathetic to the soldiers and horses than to the rebels. At St. Stephens Green, dead horses and rebels lay on the street and in the park. A wounded rebel could not safely be moved as British snipers were positioned in the Shelbourne Hotel overlooking the Green. The day was 'succeeded by a beautiful night, gusty with winds, and packed with sailing clouds and stars.' With some visitors, Stephens listened late into the night to the sounds of rifle and machine gun fire.
The Insurrection in Dublin by James Stephens, page 22, copyright © 1978, 1992 Colin Smythe Ltd., publisher: Colin Smythe, publication date: 1992
(3) French commander-in-chief Robert Nivelle rose to prominence at the end of 1916 when he retook much of the ground that had been lost to the Germans in the Battle of Verdun. He replaced Joseph Joffre as commander on December 27. Nivelle conveyed nothing but confidence in his plans to break the German line in his spring offensive, confidence his generals did not share, confidence that was unmoved by the German strategic retreat in March to a shortened, heavily fortified line. The British began his offensive on April 9, east of Arras. Canadian troops captured Vimy Ridge — high ground that had been a German stronghold since 1914 — but the British suffered some of their heaviest casualties of the war in gaining little else after the first day. The French attack on April 16 — the Second Battle of the Aisne — came to grief in its first hours. In days of fighting Nivelle's troops crossed the Aisne River and eventually captured the heights of Chemin des Dames. From there they could look across at the next German stronghold: the Ailette River and the plateau of Laon to which the Germans had retreated.
Pyrrhic Victory; French Strategy and Operations in the Great War by Robert A. Doughty, pp. 353–354, copyright © 2005 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, publisher: Harvard University Press, publication date: 2005
(4) The second of German commander Erich Ludendorff's 1918 drives for victory, Operation Georgette, the Battle of the Lys, began on April 9 on the Lys River along the Franco-Belgian border in Flanders. French reserves reinforced the British line after the latter had been driven back with heavy losses, but could not hold Mount Kemmel, adding failure to the criticism that they had moved too slowly to support their ally.
Pyrrhic Victory; French Strategy and Operations in the Great War by Robert A. Doughty, page 444, copyright © 2005 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, publisher: Harvard University Press, publication date: 2005
