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Austro-Hungarian troops guarding one of the mountain passes of the Carpathians in early 1915. © © International Film Service
A mass of German troops bear an enormous egg striped in the black, white, and red of the german flag. Atop the egg, a cannon is fired by troops with a Hungarian flag. The target, diminutive in the distance, is Paris, Eiffel Tower gray against the brown city.The watercolor is labeled,Husvét . Páris piros tojása . 1918Easter . Red eggs for Paris . 1918The front of the card is postmarked 1918-04-05 from Melököveso.The card is a Feldpostkarte, a field postcard, from Asbach Uralt, old German cognac. Above the brand name, two German soldiers wheel a field stove past a crate containing a bottle of the brandy under the title Gute Verpflegung, Good Food. Above the addressee is written Einschreiben, enroll, and Nach Ungarn, to Hungary. The card is addressed to Franz Moritos, and is postmarked Hamburg, 1918-03-30. A Hamburg stamp also decorates the card.A hand-painted postcard by Schima Martos. , Germany on registered fieldpost card, 1918, message: Red Egg for Paris, Easter, 1918.The German advance in Operation Michael in the March, 1918 nearly broke the Allied line, and threatened Paris, putting it once again in range of a new German supergun capable of hitting the city from 70 miles away.
A gleeful Russian Cossack skewers Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph in Galicia, the Empire's northeastern region isolated from the rest of the country by the Carpathian Mountains. The caption is a play on words echoing the name of the mountain range in telling Franz Joseph, 'it seems your soldiers took to their heels.' After twin defeats in the Battles of Gnila Lipa and Rava Russka, the Austro-Hungarian Army lost the great fortress at Lemberg, and was being driven out of Galicia and back through the Carpathians. Russia's attempts to break through the Carpathians continued through April 1915, with heavy losses on both sides. The Austro-Hungarians, with German support, held.
Postcard of a German soldier guarding French POWs, most of them colonial troops, the colorful uniforms of a Zouave, Spahi, Senegalese, and metropolitan French soldier contrasting with the field gray German uniform. A 1915 postcard by Emil Huber.
Two Zouaves man an anti-aircraft gun, scanning the sky, in a 1915 advertising card for the aperitif Dubonnet. Title, Pigeon Shoot.
"On 20 March [1915] a snow storm breaks over us with a ferocity found only in glacial regions. Every forward movement ceases; no wounded can be evacuated; entire lines of riflemen are covered [as] with a white cloth. The icy ground, sanded smooth by the storm, is impassable; digging in is impossible; the infantry stands without cover and unable to move in front of the enemy's defensive works; the artillery is several days' marching behind." ((1), more)
"Early in the morning of March 21st, four zeppelins headed for Paris. French airmen rose to meet them at Compeigne and forced two of them to turn back. The other two zeppelins, eluding the French patrol, kept up a running fight with pursuing aeroplanes while dropping bombs over Versailles. Sailing over Paris, they dropped 25 bombs, killing eight persons and starting a number of fires. All Paris rushed from bed at 4 a.m. to witness the fight in the air." ((2), more)
"March 22nd. [1915]The fortress is surrendering. The artillery fired up to 5 a.m. At 5.30 a.m. explosions were heard, at first separately, but later a regular hell was let loose. We opened the windows so that they should not be broken. The sun had already risen, and the plumes of smoke, lit up by the sun, presented a beautiful scene. The thunder and crash of the explosions went on uninterruptedly. It was impossible to get near a window; one was flung backwards. The panic became terrible. At every explosion the doors were blown open. Bridges, powder magazines, stores, everything was blown up in two hours. The Ruthenes were overjoyed at the Russian victory. We could no longer remain in the hospital, and for the first time we went out into the streets. Our soldiers were embracing the Austrian soldiers. In one place a ring had been formed, and our cavalry were dancing with the Ruthene women. All the footpaths were thronged with people." ((3), more)
"Behind the barbed-wire fence at Zossen — Zossen is one of the prisons near Berlin — there are some fifteen thousand men. The greater number are Frenchmen, droves of those long blue turned-back overcoats and red trousers, flowing sluggishly between the rows of long barracks, Frenchmen of every sort of training and temperament, swept here like dust by the war into common anonymity." ((4), more)
". . . far overhead a double-decker English aeroplane suddenly sailed over us. It seemed to be about six thousand feet above us, so high that the sound of its motors was lost, and its speed seemed but a lazy, level drifting across the blue. . . . we watched with peculiar interest the movements of this tiny hawk.. . . A little ball of black smoke suddenly puffed out behind that sailing bird, and presently a sharp crack of bursting shrapnel shell came down to our ears. Another puff of smoke, closer, one in front, above, below. They chased round him like swallows. In all the drab hideousness of modern warfare there is nothing so airy, so piquant, so pretty as this." ((5), more)
(1) Excerpt from the writings of Colonel George Veith of the Austro-Hungarian Third Army on the fighting to relieve the Russian siege of Przemyśl, Austria-Hungary's great fortress in Galicia. At the same time Veith was writing, horses were butchered for food within the city, and Austro-Hungarian soldiers — destined for death or Russian POW camps — were ransacking the city.
The First World War: Germany and Austria Hungary 1914-1918 by Holger H. Herwig, page 137, copyright © 1997 Holger H. Herwig, publisher: Arnold, publication date: 1997
(2)
King's Complete History of the World War by W.C. King, page 154, copyright © 1922, by W.C. King, publisher: The History Associates, publication date: 1922
(3) Entry for March 22, 1915 from the diary of a captured Russian officer in Przemyśl, Austria-Hungary on the day the fortress city surrendered to the Russians. The city had been isolated and besieged in the autumn of 1914. In the final days of the siege the food rations for soldiers and civilians were repeatedly cut, but then increased for the soldiers who would soon be marched into captivity. Stanley Washburn, the official British witness with the Russian Army, reported that 40,000 civilians were in the city when it fell, and over 110,000 Austro-Hungarian men and officers were taken.
The Great Events of the Great War in Seven Volumes by Charles F. Horne, Vol. III, 1915, p. 105, copyright © 1920 by The National Alumnia, publisher: The National Alumni, publication date: 1920
(4) Excerpt from 'Two German Prison Camps' in Antwerp to Gallipoli by Arthur Ruhl, a journalist from the neutral United States. In February and March, 1915 Ruhl wrote from Berlin. Ruhl writes on that besides the French, Zossen holds Russians, French colonial troops from North Africa and French West Africa, Gurkhas, Sikhs, and other troops from British India, and a few British soldiers, although most of those were at Döberitz, another camp in greater Berlin. British civilians were imprisoned at Ruhleben, a Berlin racetrack where Ruhl, author of 1914's People and Ideas Of the Theatre To-day, saw the inmates perform George Bernard Shaw's 'Androcles and the Lion' for an audience that included the camp commandant.
Antwerp to Gallipoli by Arthur Ruhl, pp. 118, 119, copyright © 1916 by Charles Scribner's Sons, publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons, publication date: 1916
(5) Excerpt from 'In the German Trenches at La Bassée' in Antwerp to Gallipoli by Arthur Ruhl, a journalist from the neutral United States. In March, 1915 he traveled from Cologne, Germany to the front lines, arriving a few miles north of Neuve Chapelle, France, where the Battle of Neuve Chapelle had ended on March 12.
Antwerp to Gallipoli by Arthur Ruhl, pp. 132, 133, copyright © 1916 by Charles Scribner's Sons, publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons, publication date: 1916
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