World War I Today

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 Alliés

Logo and number: ACA 2131

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Artige - Fabricant 16, Faub. St. Denis Paris Visé Paris N. au verso. Fabrication Française - Marque A.C.A

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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 God

In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown

To 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 rhyme

And 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 Kettle

In the field, before Guillemont, Somme, 4 September 1916

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A view of Sackville Street (now O'Connell), Dublin, Ireland and the bridge over the Liffey River framed by a spray of shamrocks. The card was postmarked Dublin, August 30, 1911.

Image text: Sackville Street, Dublin

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Valentine's Series

Known throughout the World

Valentine, Dublin

Printed in Scotland

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Image text:

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The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie von Hohenberg was the cover story of La Domenica del Corriere for the week July 5 through 12, 1914. The assassin, Gavrilo Princip, said he aimed, turned away, and fired, and was not targeting the Countess. The illustrator may have positioned her standing to make sense of the two wounds: the Archduke was shot through the throat, his wife through the groin. Illustration by Alberto Beltrame.
The cover story includes a picture of the deceased with their three children. A second photograph shows the new heir to the throne, Karl, holding his son, captioned "I due futuri Imperatori d'Austria" — the two future Emperors of Austria. Karl became emperor when Franz Joseph died in 1916. His son never did, as the Empire had dissolved by the time his father died.

Image text: La Domenica del Corriere

5 – 12, 1914.

L'assassinio a Serajevo dell'arciduca Francesco Ferdinando erede del trono d'Austria, e di sua moglie.

(Disegno di A. Beltrame)

The assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, and his wife.

(Drawing by A. Beltrame)

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Wednesday, April 28, 1915

"[The troopships] were already full of wounded. Eventually we arrived at a ship which had some space. My stretcher was winched up and lowered through a forward hatch onto the deck below. There were 600 wounded aboard that boat, two doctors, no nurses, no medical orderlies, no anaesthetics, and there we lay. I wasn't touched all the way to Alexandria. I lay there without any attention at all with these sticky bandages around me; they began to get a bit nasty. I don't know how long that voyage lasted. Perhaps four nights. Perhaps five. I lay looking straight up at the foremast the whole time. I was one of the luckier ones." ((1), more)

Friday, April 28, 1916

"Dawn, in fact, had lighted on a scene of destruction and desolation paralleled up to that time only by the ruined towns and cities of Northern France. To those familiar with newspaper photographs, Dublin overnight had become a second Ypres. Here rose up the same sliced, skeleton buildings, here spread the same acres of flattened and obscene rubble. Directly opposite the G.P.O. stood bare, blackened walls, smoke still wreathing around them. It was no longer possible to see as far as O'Connell Bridge. Now and then yet another wall would fall with a stupendous crash, shooting up a fresh shower of burning fragments and clouds of billowing smoke. Debris was scattered halfway across the street; steel girders hung twisted and blackened. The heat still remained and a heavy smell of burning cloth hung in the air." ((2), more)

Friday, April 28, 1916

"Headquarters, Army of the Irish Republic,

General Post Office, Dublin,

28th April, 1916. 9:30 A.M.

The Forces of the Irish Republic which was proclaimed in Dublin, on Easter Monday, 24th April, have been in possession of the central part of the Capital since 12 noon on that day. Up to yesterday afternoon, Headquarters was in touch with all the main outlying positions, and, despite furious, and almost continuous assaults by the British Forces all those positions were then still being held, and the Commandants in charge were confident of their ability to hold them for a long time.

During the course of yesterday afternoon and evening the enemy succeeded in cutting our communications with our other positions in the city and Headquarters is to-day isolated.

The enemy has burnt down whole blocks of houses, apparently with the object of giving themselves a clear field for the play of artillery and field guns against us. We have been bombarded during the evening and night by shrapnel and machine gun fire, but without material damage to our position, which is of great strength.

We are busy completing arrangements for the final defence of Headquarters, and are determined to hold it while the buildings last." ((3), more)

Saturday, April 28, 1917

"— The 28th. The thousandth day of the war. We see a certain number of marriages between elderly, but wealthy, hospital nurses and blind soldiers. At first sight that seems shocking. But after all, the ladies will enjoy what they would not otherwise enjoy. And their husbands will never see the marks of age. . . .

— One ought to say: One and a half million dead young men." ((4), more)

Sunday, April 28, 1918

"Princip, deeply grieved by the loss of his friends [Čabrinović and Grabež], and suffering, as they had, from tuberculosis in its most cruel form, died during the last year of the war, on the evening of April 28, 1918, in the hospital of Theresienstadt prison. His illness seems to have made his last years a period of physical torture. Not enough is known of the conditions of Princip's and his friends' imprisonment to pass any judgment on their jailers, or to say what might have been done to ease their final sufferings, but the evidence of three deaths in two years alone reflects little credit on the Austro-Hungarian authorities." ((5), more)

Quotation contexts and source information

Wednesday, April 28, 1915

(1) Tony Fagan was felled at Gallipoli by a Turkish bullet that struck the identity disk in his left breast pocket, deflecting the bullet into his abdomen and out through his left buttock. He found his way to two lost fellow New Zealanders who carried him until finding stretcher bearers who brought him to Anzac Cove to be evacuated. In Alexandria, Egypt, Fagan recovered in 'an extraordinarily good hospital with Indian doctors and Sikh orderlies.' He had landed on the April 25, 1915, the first day of the Allied Gallipoli campaign, and was wounded on his third day. He returned to Gallipoli in the autumn, and later fought in France.

Friday, April 28, 1916

(2) Dublin, Ireland, Ypres, General Post Office (G.P.O.), shelled by British artillery and the gunboat Helga on the Liffey River. The Easter Rising

Friday, April 28, 1916

(3) Beginning of a statement by Patrick H. Pearse, writing as Commandant-General Commanding-in-Chief, the Army of the Irish Republic and President of the Provisional Government, as the Easter Rising in Dublin, Ireland was close to defeat. Writing of the same day, Irish poet and novelist James Stephens recorded that, south of the Liffey River, the rebels had taken to the rooftops, and that, though they could cause the British troops putting down the uprising a great deal of trouble from there, 'the fact that they have to take to the roofs, even through that be in their programme, means that they are finished' ((The Insurrection in Dublin, p. 58).

Saturday, April 28, 1917

(4) Entries from April 28, 1917 from the diary of Michel Corday, French senior civil servant, living and writing in Paris. The French offensive in the Second Battle of the Aisne, was already a failure when Corday wrote. Earlier in the month he wrote against jingoists who wanted the war to continue 'to victory' at all costs, against the censorship the government imposed on the French press, and in favor of those who could speak truth about the war, both as it was in progress and after it ended. Germany declared war on France on August 3, 1914.

Sunday, April 28, 1918

(5) In proceedings that began October 12, 1914, twenty-five stood trial for involvement in the murders of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie on June 28, 1914, both shot by Gavrilo Princip. Of six would-be assassins, only one was over 20 years of age when the crime was committed, and he, Danilo Ilić, was executed. Under Austro-Hungarian law, the younger men could not be executed. Records for Princip's birth date conflicted, putting him just under or just over 20 years old on June 28: the judge ruled the evidence favoring him must take precedence. Princip, Čabrinović, who had thrown a bomb the exploded behind the royal couple, and Grabež, who had but did not throw a bomb, received the maximum sentence of 20 years. Princip had skeletal tuberculosis which led to the loss of his right arm before his death.