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A Turkish funeral with Turkish and German soldiers and officers attending and praying. Is this a young Mustapha Kemal praying?
We'll join in! Women beneath the flags of and in the uniforms of the Vierbund of Turkey, Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Bulgaria, are willing to play their part in the war effort.
Under her commander Captain Koenig, the German merchant submarine "Deutschland", largest in the world, ran the British blockade of Germany and British ships off the US coast to reach the neutral United States, arriving in Baltimore Harbor July 10, 1916.Postcard of the Deutschland of Bremen, and the tugboat Thomas F. Timmins of Baltimore.
The 12th company advancing through shell fire to supply the 1st Battalion, 32nd Landwehr Infantry Regiment. A watercolor painting by Otto Oettel of the German 32nd Landwehr dated September 29, 1916.
Hanging on the wire: dead Russian soldiers entangled in barbed wire. Attacking infantry found it nearly impossible to overcome the combination of barbed wire and machine guns. Many died trying, some left hanging in the grip of the wire.
"Through its retreat and panics the [Turkish] Third Army had lost a great part of its strength, because thousands of men left the ranks without leave. About the middle of August [1916] the Third Army reported the capture of 13,000 deserters. The prefect of Sivas had engaged to apprehend and collect 30,000 deserters in a short time." ((1), more)
"On August 22 [1916], Brusilov's army was confronted, along a twelve-mile sector of the front, by two divisions of Turkish troops, who a year earlier had been fighting at Gallipoli. But still the Austrian forces were driven back. 'The officers on the active list occupy comfortable chairs in the higher Staff appointments, General Hoffman, who was now controlling the battle in Galicia, wrote in his diary on August 27. 'Besides, there are all these different races mixed up together — no less than twenty-three distinct languages. No one understands anyone else.'" ((2), more)
"U-Boot 'Deutschland' eingetroffenBremen, 23. August 1916Eigener DrahtberichtDas erste Untersee-handelsschiff 'Deutschland' ist heute vor der Werfer-mündung angekommen und hat dort Anker geworfen. An Bord alles wohl.Submarine 'Deutschland' arrivedBremen, August 23, 1916Private wire reportThe first commercial submarine 'Deutschland' arrived today at the estuary from which it was launched, and has cast anchor there. On board, all is well." ((3), more)
"In the course of the afternoon, the bombing swelled to such a pitch that all that was left was the feeling of a kind of oceanic roar, in which individual sounds were completely subordinated. From seven o'clock the square and the houses on it were subjected to fifteen-inch-shell bombardment at thirty-second intervals. There were many that did not go off, whose short, dull thumps shook the house to its foundations. Throughout, we sat in our basement, on silk-upholstered armchairs round a table, with our heads in our hands, counting the seconds between explosions. The witticisms dried up, and finally the boldest of us had nothing to say. At eight o'clock the house next door came down after taking two direct hits; its collapse occasioned a huge cloud of dust." ((4), more)
"When morning paled, the strange surroundings gradually revealed themselves to our disbelieving eyes.The defile proved to be little more than a series of enormous craters full of pieces of uniform, weapons and dead bodies; the country around, so far as the eye could see, had been completely ploughed up by heavy shells. Not a single blade of grass showed itself. The churned-up field was gruesome. In among the living defenders lay the dead. When we dug foxholes, we realized that they were stacked in layers. One company after another, pressed together in the drumfire, had been mown down, then the bodies had been buried under showers of earth sent up by shells, and then the relief company had taken their predecessors' place. And now it was our turn.The defile and the land behind was strewn with German dead, the field ahead with British. . . ." ((5), more)
(1) Russian forces under General Nicholai Yudenich has repeatedly defeated Turkish forces of the Second and Third Armies in the mountains of Eastern Turkey, and held a line from the Black Sea to Persia.
Five Years in Turkey by Liman von Sanders, page 130, publisher: The Battery Press with War and Peace Books, publication date: 1928 (originally)
(2) By August, 1917, the offensive in Galicia mounted by Russian General Alexsei Brusilov on June 4 — one that had broken the Austro-Hungarian front — was coming to a halt. German troops reinforced their ally, and German officers began taking command. The Russians began replicating the ineffective assaults that they had conducted through much of the war, and suffered far more casualties than their enemies. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was polyglot, with German-speaking Austrians, the Magyars of Hungary, Czechs, Poles, Slovaks, Italians, Bosnians, Ruthenians, Romanians, and other ethnic groups. The language of command in the armed forces was German. Adding the Turks and, soon, the Bulgarians — all the forces of the Vierbund — complicated command and coordination. The Turks had defeated the Anglo-French invasion of Gallipoli at the beginning of the year.
The First World War, a Complete History by Martin Gilbert, page 277, copyright © 1994 by Martin Gilbert, publisher: Henry Holt and Company, publication date: 1994
(3) Evading the English blockade, the German merchant submarine Deutschland surfaced in Chesapeake Bay on July 9, 1916, docked at Norfolk, Virginia, and sailed to Baltimore, Maryland the next day. The large submarine was capable of transporting goods such as rubber, nickel, and materials for explosives that Germany desperately needed. The governments of the Entente Allies jointly protested that the Deutschland was a warship rather than a merchant, and should be interned until the end of the war. The United States disagreed, and the submarine returned to Germany, arriving in Bremen on August 23. Deutschland made a second journey, reaching Long Island Sound and New London, Connecticut on November 1. After returning to Germany a second time, she failed to sail again. Her younger sister ship Bremen left for the United States, but never arrived. By April, 1917 the United States and Germany were are war, leaving few destinations for a merchant submarine.
Short Rations: an American Woman in Germany 1915-1916 by Madeleine Z. Doty, page 160, copyright © 1917, by The Century Co., publisher: A. L. Burt Company, publication date: 1917
(4) Sebastian Jünger on what he calls 'the legendary heart of the Somme,' the village of Guillemont, August 24, 1916 when the battle was in its eighth week. His platoon moved into Combles led by a runner wearing the first steel helmet the author had seen. The helmet, the runner's expressionless face, and monotonous voice signaled that Jünger's platoon was moving into a 'new and far harsher world.' They were still in reserve, and, after being given their own steel helmets, would take the front line the morning of the 25th.
Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger, page 95, copyright © 1920, 1961, Translation © Michael Hoffman, 2003, publisher: Penguin Books, publication date: 2003
(5) Ernst Jünger in what remained of the German forward trenches on August 25, 1916, the eighth week of the Battle of the Somme. His platoon had moved in overnight, frequently walking on the dead.
Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger, pp. 97–98, copyright © 1920, 1961, Translation © Michael Hoffman, 2003, publisher: Penguin Books, publication date: 2003
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