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Photograph of a village on Lake Van, an area of Turkey populated largely by ethnic Armenians. The area was one of the first targeted on a large scale when Turkey turned on its Armenian citizens. Photo from Ambassador Morgenthau's Story by Henry Morgenthau, American Ambassador to Turkey from 1913 to 1916.
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.
A hold-to-light postcard of the German and Austro-Hungarian victory (shortlived) over the Russians in the Uzroker Pass in the Carpathians on January 28, 1915. Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, Chief of the Austro-Hungarian General Staff, launched an offensive with three armies on January 23, including the new Austro-Hungarian Seventh Army under General Karl von Pflanzer-Baltin.
Chosen Boy, a 1918 watercolor by Paul Klee. From Paul Klee: Early and Late Years: 1894-1940. © 2013 Moeller Fine Art
German postcard map of the Western Front in Flanders, looking south and including Lille, Arras, Calais, and Ostend. In the Battle of the Yser in October, 1914, the Belgian Army held the territory south of the Yser Canal, visible between Nieuport, Dixmude, and Ypres (Ypern). Further north is Passchendaele, which British forces took at great cost in 1917.
"From the deep silence of the night until morning, every few hours Armenians were brought to the prison. And so behind these high walls, the jostling and commotion increased as the crowd of prisoners became denser. It was as if all the prominent Armenian public figures — assemblymen, representatives, revolutionaries, editors, teachers, doctors, pharmacists, dentists, merchants, bankers, and others in the capital city — had made an appointment to meet in these dim prison cells. Some even appeared in their nightclothes and slippers. The more those familiar faces kept appearing, the more the chatter abated and our anxiety grew." ((1), more)
"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." ((2), more)
"Storm and rain had uncovered the torn shreds of Austrian uniforms lying on the edge of shell craters.Behind Nová Čabyna entangled in the branches of an old burnt-out pine there was hanging the boot of an Austrian infantryman with a piece of shin-bone.Where the artillery fire had raged one could see forests without leaves or cones, trees without crowns and shot-up farmsteads.The train went slowly over the freshly-built embankments so that the whole battalion could take in and thoroughly savour the delights of war. At the sight of the army cemeteries with their white crosses gleaming on the plains and on the slopes of the devastated hills all could prepare themselves slowly but surely for the field of glory which ended with a mud-bespattered Austrian cap fluttering on a white cross." ((3), more)
"Aft of the mortally wounded enemy, our U-boat crosses her course. The ship lists heavily on her port side and tries to put out lifeboats. A terrible state of affairs must be prevalent on board. The electric generators have stopped and the ship is completely dark. In the sudden sinister darkness down below, surely no one can find the closed bulkhead doors. The invading water, the slanting decks, the suddenly sloping ladders, the boiler's explosion — all that must spread confusion and mortal terror." ((4), more)
"[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." ((5), more)
(1) Excerpt from the memoir of Grigoris Balakian, a priest of the Armenian Church, and one of the Armenian intellectuals of Constantinople imprisoned on the night of April 24, 1915, and moved by buses to a waiting ferry to cross the Sea of Marmora to be moved to Ayash and Chankiri. A postwar study identified 761 men and women who were rounded up in Constantinople on April 24. Most died or were killed.
Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918 by Grigoris Balakian, page 57, copyright © Introduction and Translation 2009 by Peter Balakian, publisher: Vintage Books, publication date: 2009-00-00
(2) 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
(3) Excerpt from Jaroslav Hašek's novel The Good Soldier Švejk. Švejk (or Schweik) was a foot soldier in an Austro-Hungarian Czech battalion on its way to the front lines on the Russian Front. Nová Čabyna is on the southwestern side of the Carpathian Mountains which the Russians had been trying to battle through since the beginning of the year, but with inadequate munitions to do so. By April, 1915, when Švejk was approaching the front, Austria-Hungary had suffered nearly 800,000 casualties in the mountains since the beginning of the year.
The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek, page 592, copyright © Cecil Parrott, 1973 (translation), publisher: Penguin
(4) Excerpt from the memoir of Austro-Hungarian Captain Georg von Trapp, who had taken command of the submarine U5 and was patrolling the Adriatic Sea the night of April 26-27, 1915. The French fleet also patrolled the Adriatic both to supply their ally Montenegro, and to keep the Austro-Hungarian fleet from breaking out into the Mediterranean. After sighting then losing a French armored cruiser on the preceding days, Von Trapp correctly determined its likely location, and found the ship by moonlight. Closing on it, he fired two torpedoes, both of which struck the Léon Gambetta which went down in nine minutes with 684 of its crew. Von Trapp was Austria-Hungary's most successful submariner. He was later famous as the father of the Von Trapp Family Singers, portrayed on stage and screen in The Sound of Music.
To the Last Salute: Memories of an Austrian U-Boat Commander by Georg von Trapp, page 23, copyright © 2007, publisher: University of Nebraska Press, publication date: 2007
(5) 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.
Voices of Gallipoli by Maurice Shadbolt, pp. 20, 21, copyright © 1988 Maurice Shadbolt, publisher: Hodder and Stoughton, publication date: 1988
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