A mass of German troops bear an enormous egg striped in the black, white, and red of the german flag. Atop the egg, a cannon is fired by troops with a Hungarian flag. The target, diminutive in the distance, is Paris, Eiffel Tower gray against the brown city.The watercolor is labeled,Husvét . Páris piros tojása . 1918Easter . Red eggs for Paris . 1918The front of the card is postmarked 1918-04-05 from Melököveso.The card is a Feldpostkarte, a field postcard, from Asbach Uralt, old German cognac. Above the brand name, two German soldiers wheel a field stove past a crate containing a bottle of the brandy under the title Gute Verpflegung, Good Food. Above the addressee is written Einschreiben, enroll, and Nach Ungarn, to Hungary. The card is addressed to Franz Moritos, and is postmarked Hamburg, 1918-03-30. A Hamburg stamp also decorates the card.A hand-painted postcard by Schima Martos. , Germany on registered fieldpost card, 1918, message: Red Egg for Paris, Easter, 1918.The German advance in Operation Michael in the March, 1918 nearly broke the Allied line, and threatened Paris, putting it once again in range of a new German supergun capable of hitting the city from 70 miles away.
Image text: Husvét . Páris piros tojása . 1918Easter . Red eggs for Paris . 1918The front of the card is postmarked 1918-04-05 from Melököveso
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
German soldiers walking through snow and ruins along a destroyed rail line.
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President Woodrow Wilson addressing the United States Congress on April 2, 1917, asking for a declaration of war on Germany. From The Nations at War by Willis J. Abbot, 1918 Edition.
Image text: President Wilson delivering the message in which he called on Congress to declare a state of war between the United States and the Imperial German Government
"Day by day the limping figures grow more numerous on the pavement, the pale bandaged heads more frequent in passing carriages. In the stalls at the theatres and concerts there are many uniforms; and their wearers usually have to wait till the hall is emptied before they hobble out on a supporting arm. Most of them are very young, and it is the expression of their faces which I should like to picture and interpret as being the very essence of what I have called the look of Paris. They are grave, these young faces: one hears a great deal of the gaiety in the trenches, but the wounded are not gay. Neither are they sad, however. They are calm, meditative, strangely purified and matured. It is as though their great experience had purged them of pettiness, meanness and frivolity, burning them down to the bare bones of character, the fundamental substance of the soul, and shaping that substance into something so strong and finely tempered that for a long time to come Paris will not care to wear any look unworthy of the look on their faces." ((1), more)
"There were now just 17,000 men left, and January 8 [1916] was another calm spring-like day. Once again as at Suvla and Anzac great stores and ammunition were got ready for destruction. Landmines were laid, and the self-firing rifles set in position in the trenches. Once again the sad mules lay dead in rows. . . .The thing that the soldiers afterwards remembered with particular vividness was the curious alternation of silence and of deafening noise that went on through the day. . . .Apart from the spasmodic shelling there was no movement in the Turkish lines, and as the night advanced the Turks very largely ceased to count; it was the weather which engrossed everybody's mind. By 8 p.m. the glass was falling, and at nine when the waning moon went down the wind had risen to thirty-five miles an hour. . . ." ((2), more)
"Before we left Vauchelles some officers were overdue off leave. They and many others were hung up for a week at Havre; owing to a shortage of coal, under the new regime, trains could not be run." ((3), more)
"We have spoken now, surely, in terms too concrete to admit of any further doubt or question. An evident principle runs through the whole programme I have outlined. It is the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong or weak. Unless this principle be made its foundation no part of the structure of international justice can stand. The people of the United States could act upon no other principle, and to the vindication of this principle they are ready to devote their lives, their honor, and everything that they possess. The moral climax of this the culminating and final war for human liberty has come, and they are ready to put their own strength, their own highest purpose, their own integrity and devotion to the test." ((4), more)
(1) Conclusion of 'The Look of Paris', the first chapter of Edith Wharton's Fighting France. Wharton writes of the look of the city from mobilization in August 1914, through the disappearance of men from the city, the arrival of refugees, and the arrival of the wounded in January and February 1915, wounded who initially had been diverted from the capital, but now make their grave presence felt and visible.
Fighting France by Edith Wharton, pp. 40, 41, copyright © 1915, by Charles Scribner's Sons, publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons, publication date: 1915
(2) The Allies' Gallipoli campaign, begun in April with great hopes of quick victory, was in its penultimate day. Having already evacuated their positions at Suvla Bay and Anzac Cove to the north, a British force, its numbers determined by what the fleet could transport in a single night, held, and thinly, only Cape Helles at the end of the peninsula.
Gallipoli by Alan Moorehead, page 346, copyright © 1956 by Alan Moorehead, publisher: Perennial Classics 2002 (HarperCollins Publications 1956), publication date: 2002 (1956)
(3) Extract from the entry for January 8, 1917 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 then serving in the Somme sector, in Vauchelles-les-Quesnoy where Dunn spent 'three dull weeks.' The winter of 1916–1917 — Germany's 'Turnip Winter' — was bitterly cold. A 'coal crisis', a shortage of coal exacerbated by controls and diversion of coal to military uses, hit France, the United Kingdom, and even the United States during the winter. Great Britain appointed a Coal Controller in February 1917, the same month in which it appointed a Food Controller. 'The new regime' included the government of the new British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and a changed French Government.
The War the Infantry Knew 1914-1919 by Captain J.C. Dunn, page 290, copyright © The Royal Welch Fusiliers 1987, publisher: Abacus (Little, Brown and Company, UK), publication date: 1994
(4) The final paragraph of President Woodrow Wilson's January 8, 1918 Address to Congress in which he lays out the country's war aims, the Fourteen Points for which he said the United States was fighting. The aims included open and transparent diplomacy, freedom of the seas, equality of trade between nations, reduction in armaments, 'impartial adjustment of colonial claims,' the evacuation of occupied Russian, Belgian, and French territory including Alsace and Lorraine, adjustment of Italy's frontiers along ethnic lines, the 'opportunity for autonomous development' of the peoples of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, the end of the occupations of Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro, sovereignty for Turkey, an independent Poland, and a 'general association of nations' to guarantee 'political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.' Wilson made no mention of Albania, but calls for 'free and secure access to the sea' for Serbia. Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Albania all lie between Serbia and the Adriatic Sea.
World War I and America by A. Scott Berg, pp. 453–454, copyright © 2017 by Literary Classics of the United States, publisher: The Library of America, publication date: 2017
