The Belgian Front, August 1914, Cologne, Germany, Luxemburg, Belgium and northern France include the Belgian forts of the Meuse at Liège, Namur, and Dinant, the fortress of Antwerp, and the capital of Brussels. The fortress of Liège (Lüttich) fell on August 16. German troops paraded in Brussels on August 20 as the Belgian Army fell back to Antwerp.
Image text: Westlichen KriegsschauplatzesKöln-Lüttich-BrüsselMaßst[ab]. 1:2000000Festungen, Forts.; EisenbahnenReverse:Logo: LBPostkarten des westlichen Kriegschauplatzes Nr. 2. Import.
Happy New Year 1915! Bonne année! The New Year shoots down the Old over Paris. 1914 is represented by a German Taube, the New Year is loosely based on a French Blériot.
Image text: Bonne annéeHappy New Year1915 1914Logo: JM (?)406Reverse:Fabrication françaisMade in France
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
Pen and ink sketch by Weber of a church dated 1916–17.
Image text: Weber 1916–17.
"Flandern 1918 Prosit Neujahr!" — Happy New Year! from Flanders, 1918, a church steeple is in the distance, woods, and a green field. In the foreground ruins of a building and a bare tree. German watercolor.
Image text: Flandern 1918 Prosit Neujahr!Happy New Year! Flanders, 1918.
"Brussels, December 31, 1914 — Here is the end of the vile old year. We could see it out with rejoicing, if there were any prospect of 1915 bringing us anything better. But it doesn't look very bright for Belgium." ((1), more)
"In an hour's time 1914 will be over. . . .This afternoon, however, I had a long and frank talk with the Swiss Minister, Odier. . . . We came to the conclusion that Germany made a serious mistake in thinking she could finish the war straight off; that it will be a very, very long struggle and that victory will ultimately rest with the most tenacious of the combatants.The war will thus become a war of attrition and the attrition, alas, must be complete, involving the exhaustion of food supplies, industrial machinery and products, man power and moral forces! And it is plain that it is the moral forces which will bring about the decision in the last desperate hour." ((2), more)
"December 31st.—At 11 p.m.—midnight in Germany—for five minutes, and again at midnight for two minutes, the German artillery fired a New Year Greeting: we had one man wounded. On our left the second shoot was preceded by a shout from a German, 'Keep down, you bastards, we're going to strafe you.' We retaliated on their front line with rifles and Lewis guns, and the artillery fired twenty-four rounds of high explosive." ((3), more)
"Our future, in short, depended on the observance of the 'Live and Let Live' principle, one of the soundest elements in trench war.Unfortunately it was not invariably observed. The Germans possessed a magnificent minenwerfer, well masked under the wreckage of a place known as Steam Mill. With this weapon they celebrated the new year and demonstrated that enormous explosions could be induced at any moment on Boesinghe Church and the parts adjacent. The crash of their presents was not in keeping with the evergreens that led along to the pretty bridge and winding water. Once or twice the operators amused themselves by lobbing their trench mortar bombs into the area of the Belgians . . ." ((4), more)
"At the moment of midnight, December 31, 1917, I stood with some acquaintances in a camp finely overlooking the whole Ypres battlefield. It was bitterly cold, and the deep snow all round lay frozen. We drank healths, and stared out across the snowy miles to the line of casual flares, still rising and floating and dropping. Their writing on the night was as the earliest scribbling of children, meaningless; they answered none of the questions with which a watcher's eyes were painfully wide. Midnight; successions of coloured lights from one point, of white pendants from another, bullying salutes of guns in brief bombardment, echoes racing into space, crackling of machine-guns small on the tingling air; but the sole answer to unspoken but importunate questions was the line of lights in the same relation to Flanders and our lives as at midnight a year before. All agreed that 1917 had been a sad offender. All observed that 1918 did not look promising at its birth, or commissioned 'to solve this dark enigma scrawled in blood.'" ((5), more)
(1) The December 31, 1914 entry from the journal of Hugh Gibson, Secretary to the American Legation in Brussels, Belgium.
A Journal from our Legation in Belgium by Hugh Gibson, page 344, copyright © Copyright, 1917, by Doubleday, Page & Company, publisher: Doubleday, Page & Company, publication date: 1917
(2) Entry from the memoirs of Maurice Paléologue, French Ambassador to Russia, for Thursday, December 31, 1914. Paléologue and Odier agree that Germany made a serious mistake in thinking it could end the war quickly. But Paléologue worried that his Russian ally did not have the 'moral force' to see the war through to a successful conclusion. He concludes by quoting Russian physician and writer Anton Chekhov: 'Why do we tire so soon? How is it that after squandering so much fervour, passion, and faith we almost always go to ruin before the age of thirty? And when we fall how is it that we never try to rise again?'
An Ambassador's Memoirs Vol. I by Maurice Paléologue, pp. 231, 232, publisher: George H. Doran Company, publication date: 1925
(3) Entry for December 31, 1915 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.
The War the Infantry Knew 1914-1919 by Captain J.C. Dunn, pp. 174, 175, copyright © The Royal Welch Fusiliers 1987, publisher: Abacus (Little, Brown and Company, UK), publication date: 1994
(4) Edmund Blunden, English writer, recipient of the Military Cross, second lieutenant and adjutant in the Royal Sussex Regiment, writing of the period between Christmas, 1916 and New Years, 1917. The German minenwerfer was a trench mortar, Boesinghe a village in Ypres, Belgium. The Belgian army held the line on the British left.
Undertones of War by Edmund Blunden, page 154, copyright © the Estate of Edmund Blunden, 1928, publisher: Penguin Books, publication date: November 1928
(5) Edmund Blunden, English writer, recipient of the Military Cross, second lieutenant and adjutant in the Royal Sussex Regiment, fought in the Third Battle of Ypres, one of the most murderous battles of the war. The battlefield and the city itself were, and are, in Flanders, where Blunden had passed the prior New Year's Eve.
Undertones of War by Edmund Blunden, pp. 233–234, copyright © the Estate of Edmund Blunden, 1928, publisher: Penguin Books, publication date: November 1928
