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We Are the Hull of a Great Canoe from Southern Stand, the New Zealand War Memorial in London, England.
Photograph of a village on Lake Van, an area of Turkey populated largely by ethnic Armenians. The area was one of the first targeted on a large scale when Turkey turned on its Armenian citizens. Photo from Ambassador Morgenthau's Story by Henry Morgenthau, American Ambassador to Turkey from 1913 to 1916.
Group of Japanese Red Cross nurses and doctors on their way to Europe. In August, 1918, a Japanese Red Cross Mission arrived in Great Britain to visit the Belgian, French, and Italian fronts. This group? (http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/1410082)
The exploding shell of a French 75 mm. field gun blasts the crown from the tree of the Central Powers as the axe of Justice strikes its trunk. A background map shows British towns on the English Channel and Belgian and French cities shelled by German forces burning. A 1915 French postcard.
Design for a memorial in memory of Harold Lionel Isidore Spielmann of Pembroke College, Cambridge, a Captain in the 10th Manchester Regiment, who 'led his men with skill & gallantry & reached his objective.' He was killed in action at Helles on Gallipoli on August 13, 1915, and is buried there in the Pink Farm Cemetery. The upper portion of the design is the coat of arms of Pembroke College at Cambridge University on a field of 'P's for Pembroke College. Signed Nelson Dawson, Inv. et Fecit.
"We had to empty the dead from our trenches and drop them into the ravines too. Their bones are still there. I was on Chunuk Bair until the ninth of August. No food, no water, and the Turks were as safe as churches until they were in yards of our bayonets. In a lull in the fighting I would go and collect water bottles from our dead. You had to keep yourself going. No one else could. British troops relieved us on the ninth and were hit by enfilade fire from their own men. Gurkhas climbing Hill Q were wiped out by shellfire from a British destroyer. I remember moving downhill in the dark. There was a bloke screaming somewhere, screaming terribly. He could have been a New Zealander. He could have been a Turk. We looked for him in the dark and never found him. He just went on screaming." ((1), more)
"The mates we left behind back in the ravine, they're still on Gallipoli. Colonel Malone is too. When there was a roll call of the Wellingtons, after the battle, they reckoned there were only forty-seven fit men left of all the 700 who went up Chunuk Bair on the morning of August the eighth.I got taken off Gallipoli two days after, on the tenth of August. I never was in any other war. That one was enough for me. It never did anything, never gained nothing, but I been thinking about it ever since, all the years of my life, most of all that day on Chunuk Bair." ((2), more)
"Under a third measure, [Vice-Governor] Atif and [Police Chief] Behaeddin arrested the city's prominent Armenians, regardless of denomination. And on the night of August 11, 1915, the local military commander and the police chief, having previously taken all 'restrictive,' precautionary measures, arrested all the remaining Armenians. Telling them, 'The police department wants you,' they filled up the prisons and various buildings that had been converted into prisons with Armenians.The prominent prisoners—lawyers, bankers, merchants, and Armenian government officials—were taken out on the road in the first caravan, under the supervision of the police commissioner, the prison warden, police, soldiers, and officers." ((3), more)
"Upon rising the next morning, we found that about 100 versts of our journey still remained to be covered. Our train dragged along at a painful pace, stopping at every station for long, intermediary halts. On one station we made the acquaintance of three Red Cross Sisters who had been in the Retreat from Warsaw. One of them was Japanese, but spoke fluent Russian and was serving in a Russian Red Cross Unit. The elder of her companions described some of their experiences and spoke with horror of the poisonous gas employed by the Germans. In one district near Warsaw, she said, there was a field the memory of which could never be erased. It was heaped with the bodies of soldiers who had been gassed and the terrible positions of the men in death added to the ghastly spectacle: she had heard that over 6,000 men had been forced to vyyte iz stroya [fall out of formation] that day from gas alone." ((4), more)
". . . Compared with the towns of the north, Rheims is relatively unharmed; but for that very reason the arrest of life seems the more futile and cruel. The Cathedral square is deserted, all the houses around it are closed. And there, before us, rose the Cathedral — a cathedral, rather, for it was not the one we had always known. It was, in fact, not like any cathedral on earth. When the German bombardment began, the west front of Rheims was covered with scaffolding: the shells set it on fire, and the whole church was wrapped in flames. Now the scaffolding is gone, and in the dull provincial square there stands a structure so strange and beautiful, that one must search the Inferno, or some tale of Eastern magic, for words to picture the luminous unearthly vision. The lower part of the front has been warmed to deep tints of umber and burnt siena. This rich burnishing passes, higher up, through yellowish-pink and carmine, to a sulphur whitening to ivory; and the recesses of the portals and the hollows behind the statues are lined with a black denser and more velvety than any effect of shadow to be obtained by sculptured relief. The interweaving of colour over the whole blunted bruised surface recalls the metallic tints, the peacock-and-pigeon iridescences, the incredible mingling of red, blue, umber and yellow of the rocks along the Gulf of Ægina. And the wonder of the impression is increased by the sense of its evanescence; the knowledge that this is the beauty of disease and death, that every one of the transfigured statues must crumble under the autumn rains, that every one of the pink or golden stones is already eaten away to the core, that the Cathedral of Rheims is glowing and dying before us like a sunset. . ." ((5), more)
(1) Vic Nicholson was 88 years old when Maurice Shadbolt interviewed him in New Zealand in 1983. He was 20 and in the Wellington Infantry Battalion on Gallipoli and Chunuk Bair in 1915. A fortune teller in Cairo had told him he would survive the war, and he never doubted he would.Much of the language of PJ Harvey's song 'The Colour Of the Earth' from the album 'Let England Shake' is based on this interview.
Voices of Gallipoli by Maurice Shadbolt, pp 94, 95, copyright © 1988 Maurice Shadbolt, publisher: Hodder and Stoughton, publication date: 1988
(2) Excerpt from an interview by Maurice Shadbolt of Corporal Charlie Clark who served on Gallipoli with the New Zealand Wellington Battalion. Their mission on August 8, 1915, was to take the summit of Chunuk Bair, which they did after an Allied bombardment. Men who reached the summit could see the Narrows of the Dardanelles, and might have had the hope the attack would continue across the peninsula and cut off the Turks. Looking to the north, they could see the British troops who had landed at Suvla Bay the night of August 6, who did little against a thin Turkish defense. Clark was wounded in the leg by a Turkish bullet that left a wound so big he couldn't cover it with his hand. The ravine to which Clark dragged himself early in the day soon filled with 200 wounded with no water, no medical attention, under bombardment, and with little chance to make their way down the hill.
Voices of Gallipoli by Maurice Shadbolt, page 67, copyright © 1988 Maurice Shadbolt, publisher: Hodder and Stoughton, publication date: 1988
(3) Excerpt from the account of Grigoris Balakian of the extermination of the Armenians of Ankara, Turkey. Vice-Governor Atif and Police Chief Behaeddin and were sent by Interior Minister Talaat Pasha to replace the prior Governor General of Ankara, Mazhar, who resisted deporting the Armenians and resigned his position. The authorities divided the Armenians into caravans which were individually sent from the city, in some cases the Armenians pulling wagons bearing the weapons that would be used to kill them.
Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918 by Grigoris Balakian, pp. 83, 84, copyright © Introduction and Translation 2009 by Peter Balakian, publisher: Vintage Books, publication date: 2009-00-00
(4) The great Russian Retreat of 1915 continued, taking Frances Farmborough, an English teacher turned Red Cross nurse serving in a unit of the Russian Army, with it. By August 12, 1915, the joint German-Austro-Hungarian Gorlice-Tarnow Offensive, already over three months old, had removed the Russian threat to Austria-Hungary, overrun the great but antiquated fortresses defending Warsaw, and had captured, on August 5, that greatest city of Polish Russia. Japan was allied with Russia, France, and Great Britain, but had limited military involvement in 1914 and 1915, seizing some of Germany's colonies in Asia, such as the port city of Tsingtao.The Russian verst was 2/3 of a mile. Bracketed translation in the original.
Nurse at the Russian Front, a Diary 1914-18 by Florence Farmborough, pp. 110, 111, copyright © 1974 by Florence Farmborough, publisher: Constable and Company Limited, publication date: 1974
(5) Edith Wharton toured the Western Front in 1915, reporting from the Argonne, Lorraine, the Vosges, northern France, and Belgium. In August she toured Alsace, stopping in Reims, France on her way. German artillery first shelled the magnificent Cathedral on September 19, 1914 igniting scaffolding that covered the north tower, and beginning a fire that spread to other woodwork within the building. The building was intermittently shelled throughout the war, particularly in the spring of 1917 when it was struck with 70 high-caliber shells.
Fighting France by Edith Wharton, pp. 184-186, copyright © 1915, by Charles Scribner's Sons, publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons, publication date: 1915
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