A Swiss postcard of 'The European War' in 1914. The Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary face enemies to the east, west, and south. Germany is fighting the war it tried to avoid, battling Russia to the east and France to the west. Germany had also hoped to avoid fighting England which came to the aid of neutral (and prostrate) Belgium, and straddles the Channel. Austria-Hungary also fights on two fronts, against Russia to the east and Serbia and Montenegro to the south. Italy, the third member of the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary, declared neutrality, and looks on. Other neutral nations include Spain, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania. Japan enters from the east to battle Germany. The German Fleet stays close to port in the North and Baltic Seas while a German Zeppelin targets England. The Austro-Hungarian Fleet keeps watch in the Adriatic. Turkey is not represented, and entered the war at the end of October, 1914; Italy in late May, 1915.
Image text: Der Europäische KriegThe European WarReverse:Kriegskarte No. 61. Verlag K. Essig, BaselKunstanstalt (Art Institute) Frobenius A.G. Basel
Original Austro-Hungarian sketch in colored pencil, dated December 20, 1915, field postmarked the next day. Signed 'Rob. Korschbu(?)'.
Image text: Dated 1915-12-20; signed 'Rob. Korschbu(?)'.
'December snow.' Hand-painted watercolor calendar for December 1917 by Schima Martos. Particulates from a smoking kerosene lamp overspread the days of December, and are labeled 'December höra,' 'December snow.' The first five days or nights of the month show a couple at, sitting down to, or rising from a lamp-lit table. The rest of the month the nights are dark, other than four in which the quarter of the moon shows through a window, or Christmas, when the couple stands in the light of a Christmas tree.
Image text: December höraDecember snow2½ liter petroleum.
Saint Nicholas pulls his sled along a road stretched between two Christmas tree boughs and Christmas greetings. The Iron Cross below is dated 1917.
Image text: Fröhliche WeihnachtenMerry Christmas
"We're in the trenches, and Christmas Eve was hardly worth the bother. We had a biscuit and a cup of tea! What a feast! One of my pals sang Minuit! Chrétiens for us. It didn't lack a certain grandeur in the midst of intense gunfire. I'm in a hurry to return home. You miss me so much and so do the children. Here we're getting by, cold and wretched. Fortunately, our captain is looking after us well." ((1), more)
". . . it was rather difficult to improve the trench, especially as no work was possible by day owing to the fact that the Hun on Hill 70 would look down and shoot right along it. This fact was not fully appreciated by the Powers That Be who wear Red Hats, until one of them arrived about eleven o'clock in the morning on Christmas Eve and shouted down the steps of my dug-out for me. I went up and found an irate Staff Officer who wanted to know why the devil my men were not doing any work! I pointed out to him, respectfully but firmly, that unless he wanted half the men blotted out it was an impossibility. While arguing the point, he started along the trench and when he was about thirty yards away from the dug-out the Huns put over a covey of 'pip-squeaks'. I've never seen a staff officer hurry so fast in all my life! He bolted into my dug-out like a rabbit, head first. He then stayed so long talking about the impossibility of working by day, that I very nearly had to offer him lunch! Christmastime did not reduce the daily hate on both sides." ((2), more)
"December 24th.—A most untimely draft has arrived; it unbalances our numbers and our provision for the men's Christmas dinner. The new men are dismounted Yeomanry, the best physically we have had since Spring. The evidence that they had had a year's training was far to seek." ((3), more)
"On Christmas Eve, the Royal Flying Corps made its first avowed reprisal raid on Germany. Ten aircraft droned over the misty Rhine valley to bomb Mannheim in daylight. A bridge over the Neckar was demolished, and fires were seen burning in the city. Four bombs crashed on the main railway station. A Swiss account of the mid-morning attack was read in London with considerable satisfaction and some regrets. The Kaiser's special train, it informed, had left the station only half an hour before the bombs struck." ((4), more)
(1) Corporal Louis Bénard of the 272nd Infantry Regiment writing in the Argonne on Christmas Eve, 1914. 'Minuit! Chrétiens' (Cantique de Noël) was composed by Adolphe Adam in 1847 and translated into English by John Sullivan Dwight as 'O Holy Night'.
They Shall Not Pass: The French Army on the Western Front 1914-1918 by Ian Sumner, page 44, copyright © Ian Sumner 2012, publisher: Pen and Sword, publication date: 2012
(2) Lieutenant. G. Barber, 1st Battalion, Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders, 1st Brigade, 1st Division on an incident the morning of December 24, 1915 and why his men could not repair the trench they occupied. The pip-squeak was a small German artillery shell, named by British soldiers for the sounds it made in being fired and in flight.
1915, The Death of Innocence by Lyn Macdonald, pp. 591, 592, copyright © 1993 by Lyn Macdonald, publisher: Henry Holt and Company, publication date: 1993 (Great Britain); 199
(3) The entry for December 24, 1916 from the writings — diaries, letters, and memoirs — of Captain J.C. Dunn, Medical Officer of the Second Battalion His Majesty's Twenty-Third Foot, the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and fellow soldiers who served with him. The Battalion was near Bray, in the Somme sector. The Yeomanry were light cavalry, historically a volunteer force.
The War the Infantry Knew 1914-1919 by Captain J.C. Dunn, pp. 286–287, copyright © The Royal Welch Fusiliers 1987, publisher: Abacus (Little, Brown and Company, UK), publication date: 1994
(4) Beginning in 1915, first Zeppelin and Schütte-Lanz airships, then Gotha and other large multi-engine planes had bombed London and other cities in England. The Royal Flying Corps' December 24, 1917 raid on Mannheim, Germany was the first reprisal raid on a primarily civilian site in Germany itself.
The Sky on Fire by Raymond H. Fredette by Raymond H. Fredette, page 178, copyright © 1966, 1976, 1991 by Raymond H. Fredette, publisher: Smithsonian Institution Press, publication date: 1991
