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A portrait of German General Paul von Hindenburg superimposed on a map of his victories in East Prussia and conquests in Russia. In Prussia (in pink) the Russians took Gumbinnen and Insterburg before being defeated at Allenstein (in the Battle of Tannenburg), and in the First Battle of the Masurian Lakes in the first two months of war in 1914. Before the year had ended, German troops advanced well into Polish Russia before being driven back. In 1915 von Hindenburg was victorious, taking the fortresses and cities of Ivangarod, Grodno, and Warsaw, in his Gorlice-Tarnow offensive. Tarnow in Galicia is at the bottom of the map, Austria-Hungary being show in yellow.
On guard against saboteurs and espionage, troops guard the Boston & Maine Railroad bridge and the Hoosac Tunnel, in Adams, Massachusetts.
Austro-Hungarian trench art pencil drawing on pink paper of a soldier in a ragged, many-times-patched uniform, labeled 'Bilder ohne Worte' (No Comment, or Picture without Words). Kaiser Karl who succeeded Emperor Franz Joseph is on reverse. The printed text on the reverse is in Hungarian and German.
Currency card for the United States, with American coins, currency conversions, and the national flag.
"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.
"December 27, 1917.—The Russians are in despair, and some of them even talked of withdrawing altogether. They had thought the Germans would renounce all occupied territory without further parley, or hand it over to the Bolsheviks. Long sittings between the Russians, Kühlmann, and myself, part of the time with Hoffman. . . .Afternoon.—Matters still getting worse. Furious wire from Hindenburg about 'renunciation' of everything; Ludendorff telephoning every minute; more furious outbursts, Hoffman very excited, Kühlmann true to his name and 'cool' as ever." ((1), more)
"The national necessity of transporting troops to the cantonments and the seaboard, of moving Army equipment and supplies, of distributing food, fuel and other commodities among the people, made necessary the immediate unification of the American Railroads under one system, co-operated under Government control.In December, 1917, the Interstate Commerce Commission recommended such action, and the President by proclamation took over the railroads on December 28, 1917." ((2), more)
"The Austro-Hungarians had never really recovered from the devastating losses in Galicia and Serbia in the first year of the war. Since the beginning of the war, of the 8,420,000 men enrolled in the services, more than 4,000,000 had been lost, of whom 780,000 were dead, 500,000 were wounded and disabled, and over 1,600,000 were prisoners. In addition, industrial development within the empire had been limited and the economy was still predominantly agrarian. To make matters worse, the blockade enforced by the Western Allies was creating desperate shortages of raw materials and food." ((3), more)
"When interested folksWax eloquentIn their praisesOf your patriotism,And nobility,And self sacrifice,And other virtues,Carefully countThe contentsOf your pay envelope." ((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) Excerpt from the entry for December 27, 1917 by Count Ottokar Czernin in his In the World War, on the stalemate at the Brest-Litovsk peace conference between Russia and the Central Powers. Baron Richard von Kühlmann was Germany's Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs from August 6, 1917 to July 9, 1918. Major General Max Hoffman commanded the German Eighth Army on the Russian Front, and took part in the negotiations. Generals Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff shared leadership of the German army, and were virtual dictators while in power.
In the World War by Count Ottokar Czernin, pp. 253, 254, copyright © 1920, by Harper & Brothers, publisher: Harper and Brothers, publication date: 1920
(2) The United States Congress had voted in support of President Woodrow Wilson's request for a declaration of war on Germany on April 6, 1917, but would take a year to build an army and transport it to Europe.
King's Complete History of the World War by W.C. King, page 355, copyright © 1922, by W.C. King, publisher: The History Associates, publication date: 1922
(3) Summary of Austria-Hungary's situation at the end of 1917. Austria-Hungary's three 1914 invasions of Serbia failed at great cost. In four battles against Russia the same year, Austria-Hungary lost its northeastern province of Galicia, much of the Empire's rolling stock, and 350,000 men.
Caporetto and the Isonzo Campaign: The Italian Front 1915–1918 by John MacDonald with Željko Cimprić, page 176, copyright © John MacDonald, 2011, 2015, publisher: Pen and Sword Books, publication date: 2011
(4) Excerpt from 'The Sayings of Patsy' by Bernice Evans, in the New York Call, a Socialist Party newspaper, December 30, 1917. Evans wrote thirteen poems of that name.
World War I and America by A. Scott Berg, page 446, copyright © 2017 by Literary Classics of the United States, publisher: The Library of America, publication date: 2017
(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
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