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Russian children running from German soldiers. A pencil sketch on blank postcard field postmarked March 31, 1916.
A woman munitions worker carrying a shell apparently drops another one on the foot of a frightened man who clearly does not realize, as she does, that they are not in danger. No doubt his foot hurt.
A Russian POW leaning on a shovel or other tool. A drawing by Wilhelm Hartmann dated September 22, 1915.
I've killed many Germans, but never women or children. Original French watercolor by John on blank field postcard. In the background are indolent Russian soldiers and Vladimir Lenin, in the foreground stands what may be a Romanian soldier who is telling the Russians, 'You call me savage. I killed a lot of Boches [Germans], but never women or children!'
Austrian Mountain Rangers 'resting in the shade of southern flora' on the Italian front. The card was postmarked from Berlin on January 5, 1916.
"In January, 1917, temperatures went down to more than forty degrees below zero, and the railway network upon which the cities utterly depended for their food and the army for its supplies were frozen to a standstill. The desire for food, warmth, and peace dominated the mind of the ordinary man, and you had only to join a bread queue to realize that the Russian worker, for all his docility, his famous capacity for enduring terrible hardships, was approaching one of his periodic outbursts of semimadness, when he could think of nothing but to smash and burn and destroy. This—not the Germans—was the danger which the 'official' classes really feared and tried desperately to impress upon the Czar." ((1), more)
"The Royal Flying Corps always leads the way in matters of invention and experiment, and I hear it is taking up the only solution of the man-power problem with energy, that is to say, the employment of women." ((2), more)
"If someone had said to me, 'One day you're going to eat soup made from dirty potatoes', or 'You're going to fight over a swede', I would have said 'What nonsense!' But nothing surprises me here — like today, I saw a soldier rummaging in a rubbish pit, picking out potato and swede peelings and eating them slowly to make them last. The hunger is dreadful: you feel it constantly, day and night. You have to forget who you once were and what you have become.Our people resent the fact that the French, Belgians and English live so well and are not forced to work. They don't go about hungry like we do. They boast that their governments send them bread and parcels from home. But we, Russians, get nothing: our punishment for fighting badly. Or, perhaps, Mother Russia has forgotten about us." ((3), more)
"The men are starting to look human again, they can cut their hair, shave, put on clean underwear and mend their clothes and clean their guns. The officers spend all day drinking and playing cards. They get their batmen to get self-distilled vodka from the rear or buy up triple-strength eau de cologne which does just as well.There is nothing to read, just some old newspapers. But Borov got hold of a whole pile of new editions. They accuse the Government of greed, indecision and secret negotiations with the Germans. We read all this in secret. Zemlianitsky says, 'It's time to finish off this war, brothers!'" ((4), more)
"The Allies had abandoned exclusive use of patrolled routes in the Mediterranean shortly before the Germans adopted unrestricted submarine warfare. The Germans declared the great majority of the Mediterranean a Sperrgebiet (prohibited area) except for the extreme western portion off Spain, including the Balearics, and initially, the 20-mile-wide corridor to Greek waters. The Austrians promised to assist the Germans outside the Adriatic. Their smaller submarines as they became available would now operate against Allied shipping between Malta and Cerigo. In the early part of 1917, the situation in the Mediterranean was deceptively favorable to the Allies, for in January the greater part of the Mediterranean U-boat flotilla was under repair and refit at Pola and Cattaro after the heavy demands of 1916. In January sinkings fell to 78,541 tons, only 24 percent of the total of 328,391 tons sunk in all theaters. It was the lull before the storm . . ." ((5), more)
(1) The bitterly cold winter, the demands of the war, the coal shortage, transport failures, all were speeding the crisis around Russian Nicholas II to a head. If not indifferent, if not oblivious, he failed to act to protect those over whom he ruled, the army he commanded, the family he headed, and himself.
The Russian Revolution by Alan Moorehead, page 132, copyright © 1958 by Time, Inc., publisher: Carroll and Graf, publication date: 1989
(2) Item from the Evening Standard and St James's Gazette, January 26, 1917.
The Virago Book of Women and the Great War by Joyce Marlow, Editor, page 242, copyright © Joyce Marlow 1998, publisher: Virago Press, publication date: 1999
(3) Excerpt from a diary by Russian POW Alexei Zyikov, captured in Russian Poland in 1915, and held in a POW camp in northeastern Germany. Russian POWs did not receive food parcels from the Russian government.
Intimate Voices from the First World War by Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Wallis, page 268, copyright © 2003 by Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Wallis, publisher: Harper Collins Publishers, publication date: 2003
(4) Russian soldier Dmitry Oskin writing in January, 1917. Russian Prime Minister Protopopov was . . . The Empress Alexandra, wife of Tsar Nicholas II, was believed to favor Germany, and possibly actively forwarding its interest. Oskin writes that new recruits, primarily Ukranian, continue to arrive. On being given lentils for lunch, they start a food riot.
Intimate Voices from the First World War by Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Wallis, page 289, copyright © 2003 by Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Wallis, publisher: Harper Collins Publishers, publication date: 2003
(5) The British, French, and Italian allies only poorly coordinated efforts to counteract the U-boat threat in the Mediterranean, trying to establishing zones and patrolled routes. The Austro-Hungarian Adriatic ports of Pola and Cattaro were used by both Austrian and German U-boats. Germany proclaimed a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare beginning February 1, 1917.
A Naval History of World War I by Paul G. Halpern, page 390, copyright © 1994 by the United States Naval Institute, publisher: UCL Press, publication date: 1994
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