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Imperial Russian soldiers on parade in France.Message and postmark Marseille, April 22, 1916.
Russian soldiers resting in the field. Card postmarked November 28, 1916.
Detail from a 1898 map of St. Petersburg, the Russian capital, from a German atlas. Central St Petersburg, or Petrograd, is on the Neva River. Key landmarks from top to bottom include the Peter and Paul Fortress, which served as a prison, Nevski Prospect, a primary boulevard south of the Fortress, and the Mariyinsky Theater.
A call to Italians to buy war bonds to help fund the powerful weapons needed for the last push to Trieste, a mere 25 kilometers from the Italian front lines. It pays 5%, after all, tax free, for an effective rate of 5.55%!
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.
"Matters had not been helped by a division of 17,000 Russian soldiers who had fought with Nivelle on the Aisne and then had been unwisely retained in France. Wherever they were stationed they preached revolution. An attempt had been made to ship them back to Russia, but Kerenski did not want them. In time they had become so Bolshevik in sentiment, so troublesome, that it was decided to ask them to surrender, as though they were enemy troops. Only 57 did so. The rest dug trenches and put up barricades. While the civilian population hurriedly departed, a final ultimatum was issued on September 14. It was refused. Next day their food was cut of and they were encircled. On the following day they were attacked." ((1), more)
"Comby looked at his watch, looked down again at the camp. And at precisely 10 A.M. from a hill to the west, there came the flat reports of four spaced shots from the battery of 75s. The battle for La Courtine had begun.The first artillery shot had been a blank, but the next three were exercise projectiles, nonexplosive metal slugs, 'less deadly than regular field projectiles but dangerous nevertheless,' observed Comby. The three shells landed against a hill flanking the rows of barracks and sent up warning plumes of dirt.There was a period of silence to let the threat implied by these warning shots sink in upon the rebels. Then from the barracks the watchers heard a strange sound. The rebels were singing 'The Marseillaise'—followed by Chopin's 'Funeral March.'" ((2), more)
"We hear that Kornilov has been arrested, and do not know whether to be sad or glad; our loyalties are so evenly divided. Kerensky has been our hero since the political revolution in March 1917, but it was thanks to Kornilov that our Armies — especially our beloved 8th Army — achieved such success in Galicia during the recent summer campaigns." ((3), more)
"Russians might have resisted Bolshevism if there had been a real alternative; but the collapse of capitalism was there for all to see. Wages became meaningless: strikes came, one after another, and caused a fall of fifty per cent in industrial production in the summer of 1917.The principal problem in all this was that wages could not be translated into food. Industry had done well enough from the inflation, at least in its earlier stages, before the autumn of 1916. Agriculture was not in a position to profit nearly as much, and the result of inflation was to drive the bulk of food-producers back into the subsistence-economy from which they had only recently emerged, if at all. Food-deliveries to the towns ran down after November, 1916; Petrograd had, when the March Revolution occurred, only a few days' grain-reserves, and the bread-riots that sparked off the revolution continued to detonate revolutionary explosions throughout the summer and autumn." ((4), more)
"On 19 September [1917], Cadorna halted the battle and ordered all units onto the defensive. The Italians had taken 166,000 casualties, including 40,000 dead, of whom 25,000 died on San Gabriele for trivial gains. Some 400 of the 600 battalions involved in the battle had lost one-half to two-thirds of their strength. Cadorna's and Capello's actions in Eleventh Battle were so careless and self-destructive that historians have struggled to account for them. In truth, the two men acted fully in character. Cadorna's battle plans always tended to incoherence, his command often slackened fatally in the course of offensives, and he had never been able to control Capello (except by banishing him from the Isonzo). Capello's disobedience at critical moments was equally familiar." ((5), more)
(1) After the failure of French commander in chief Robert Nivelle's 1917 spring offensive — the Second Battle of the Aisne, begun on April 16 — an offensive that Nivelle had asserted would provide the breakthrough of the German line that would lead to victory, mutinous incidents broke out in the French army, particularly among the troops that had suffered the highest rates of casualties in the offensive. The mutinies were of greater or lesser severity, beginning in April, with increasingly disruptive incidents in May, and the most violent and serious in the first weeks of June. Four brigades of Russian soldiers were sent two France in the spring of 1916, two of them immediately being sent to the Salonika Front. The Russian Revolution of March provided a model for some soldiers. The Russian troops were sent to a hastily evacuated camp for German prisoners of war in La Courtine, 450 km south of Paris, on June 26, 1917, and it was there they made their stand.
In Flanders Fields, the 1917 Campaign by Leon Wolff, page 170, copyright © 1958 by Leon Wolff, publisher: The Viking Press, publication date: 1958
(2) Four brigades of Russian soldiers were sent too France in the spring of 1916, two of them immediately being sent to the Salonika Front. The Russian Revolution of March and the French army mutinies of May and June played out in the Russian units on both fronts. On September 16, 1917, the two brigades that remained in France were isolated in La Courtine, 450 kilometers south of Paris, where they had entrenched, refusing to submit to French or Russian authorities. French General Louis Comby led the siege of the camp to compel the Russians' surrender.
Dare Call it Treason by Richard M. Watt, page 273, copyright © 1963 by Richard M. Watt, publisher: Simon and Schuster, publication date: 1963
(3) Excerpt from the entry for September 4, (September 17, New Style), 1917 from the diary of Florence Farmborough, an English nurse serving with the Russian Red Cross, on the arrest of General Lavr Kornilov for plotting a military coup against the government of Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky. Kerensky had appointed Kornilov Supreme Commander of the Russian Army on July 31, 1917 following his relative success in the Russian offensive earlier in the month. Although claiming to support the Revolution, Kornilov opposed many of its reforms, and wanted to bring back the death penalty for deserters from the army, many of whom had simply left the front. He had begun planning a coup with conservative officers, financiers, and industrialists in the first days of the revolution. Kornilov asked that command of the government as well as the military be transferred to himself specifically to prevent a Bolshevik coup. Kerensky had already held the titles of Justice Minister and War Minister when he asked the government to hand him power to deal with Kornilov.
Nurse at the Russian Front, a Diary 1914-18 by Florence Farmborough, page 315, copyright © 1974 by Florence Farmborough, publisher: Constable and Company Limited, publication date: 1974
(4) Major events that followed the Russian Revolution of February (March New Style) 1917 — the Kerensky Offensive of June and July, the suppression of Bolsheviks and their leader Vladimir Lenin, the right-wing coup attempt by General Lavr Kornilov, the release and arming of the Bolsheviks to defend the government and capital of Petrograd from Kornilov — all took place against a backdrop of demonstrations, food shortages, rising unemployment, and a collapsing economy.
The Eastern Front, 1914-1917 by Norman Stone, pp. 291–292, copyright © 1975 Norman Stone, publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons, publication date: 1975
(5) In September 1917 Italian commander in chief Luigi Cadorna called a halt to his Eleventh Battle of the Isonzo since Italy had entered the war in May 1915. In four Isonzos in the first calendar year, five in 1916, and two more by September 1917, Cadorna had crossed the Isonzo River into Austria-Hungary, taken some territory, and cost hundreds of thousands of casualties. Beyond each plateau and mountain peak another awaited. General Luigi Capello had earned his nickname of 'the Butcher' in Italy's conquest of Libya.
The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1919 by Mark Thompson, page 282, copyright © 2008 Mark Thompson, publisher: Basic Books, publication date: 2009
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