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German Taube on a bombing run of Paris.
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.
The Russo-Turkish frontier from Cram's 1896 Railway Map of the Turkish Empire. The Black Sea is in the northwest, Persia to the southeast. The area had a large Armenian and Christian population, and was a principal site of the Armenian Genocide and of Russian military successes.
German and Austro-Hungarian forces under the command of generals von Hindenburg and Archduke Friedrich besieged Warsaw, and took it during the Gorlice-Tarnow Offensive. Austrians von Hötzendorf, Friedrich, and Pflanzer-Baltin form the bottom of the ring; the others are German. The flag and shield of Germany are on the bottom left; those of Austria and Hungary the bottom right.
Western Front: Aisne & Oise. French folding postcard map of the Aisne and Oise, number 3 from the series Les Cartes du Front. The map includes the Champagne front from Compiègne in the west to Chalons-sur-Marne in the east including Soissons, Chemin des Dammes, Laon, Reims, and Château Thierry.
"Day by day the limping figures grow more numerous on the pavement, the pale bandaged heads more frequent in passing carriages. In the stalls at the theatres and concerts there are many uniforms; and their wearers usually have to wait till the hall is emptied before they hobble out on a supporting arm. Most of them are very young, and it is the expression of their faces which I should like to picture and interpret as being the very essence of what I have called the look of Paris. They are grave, these young faces: one hears a great deal of the gaiety in the trenches, but the wounded are not gay. Neither are they sad, however. They are calm, meditative, strangely purified and matured. It is as though their great experience had purged them of pettiness, meanness and frivolity, burning them down to the bare bones of character, the fundamental substance of the soul, and shaping that substance into something so strong and finely tempered that for a long time to come Paris will not care to wear any look unworthy of the look on their faces." ((1), more)
"9.1.15 Parade at 8 a.m. I take four men to dig communication trench. Work until 5 p.m. and reach billet at 6.30 p.m. The trenches are now waist deep in water, part of section returned early, being soaked through, breast-high. My party had to run the gauntlet on returning across the open in preference to coming through the trenches!" ((2), more)
"The [Turkish] 5th Expeditionary Force reached Diyarbakir on 10 January, by which time the situation in the Caucasus had been transformed out of all recognition. The following day Halil Bey learned that his orders had been revised: he was now to make for Erzurum, to reinforce the garrison there. In all he brought with him about nine thousand men, of whom perhaps 75 per cent were combat-fit, and received a warm welcome. However, he also brought something far less acceptable: spotted typhus. It ran through the garrison like wildfire, and Hafiz Hakki was an early victim; he died on 12 February, to be replaced in command of the Third Army by Mahmut Kamil Pasha, who retained the German, Guse, as his chief of staff." ((3), more)
"When Ludendorff detached a number of of divisions from Oberost to support Conrad (a technical device which he hoped would lead to a supreme command of both German and Austrian forces in the east, Falkenhayn promptly formed them into an independent army and ordered Ludendorff himself to report to it as chief-of-staff! Hindenburg was called in to write a personal appeal to the Kaiser for the return of his indispensable aide. A meeting took place at Breslau on 11th January, at which Falkenhayn's suave courtesy made a disagreeable impression '. . . it was all unsatisfactory and pointless, a contest of opinions settled beforehand', wrote Ludendorff in his diary." ((4), more)
"20 Dec-12 Jan [1915]The French attack in Flanders, at La Boiselle, in the Argonne, on the Meuse, on the Aisne, and around Reims . . ." ((5), more)
(1) Conclusion of 'The Look of Paris', the first chapter of Edith Wharton's Fighting France. Wharton writes of the look of the city from mobilization in August 1914, through the disappearance of men from the city, the arrival of refugees, and the arrival of the wounded in January and February 1915, wounded who initially had been diverted from the capital, but now make their grave presence felt and visible.
Fighting France by Edith Wharton, pp. 40, 41, copyright © 1915, by Charles Scribner's Sons, publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons, publication date: 1915
(2) Entry for January 9, 1915 from the pocket diary of Corporal. A Letyford, 5th Field Company, Royal Engineers, writing of the flooded marshland in Flanders. For the prior days of the month, his brief entries about water that is knee-deep, that is four feet deep, that is waist-deep. He and his men build a dam against water that is running from German trenches, they fix pumps, build a bridge, and rebuild it after it is 'knocked into the stream.' It rains constantly, and the men are covered in mud. German troops fire on them as they work.
1915, The Death of Innocence by Lyn Macdonald, pp. 19, 20, copyright © 1993 by Lyn Macdonald, publisher: Henry Holt and Company, publication date: 1993 (Great Britain); 199
(3) Excerpt from Roger Ford's account of the Battle of Sarikamish and its aftermath in the Russo-Turkish frontier. The Turkish invasion of Russia had been a disaster — the transformation Ford writes of — for Turkey and its soldiers, and the Turks desperately needed reinforcements. In winter 1915, typhus was raging elsewhere, including in Serbia.
Eden to Armageddon: World War I in the Middle East by Roger Ford, page 141, copyright © Roger Ford 2010, publisher: Pegasus Books, publication date: 2010
(4) Generals Paul von Hindenburg and his chief-of-staff Erich Ludendorff, commanding Germany's armies on the Eastern Front, insisted they could win the war by a victory over Russia before turning on the British and French on the Western Front. German Chief of the General Staff Erich von Falkenhayn had already watched German forces sweep across Polish Russia three times and be driven back. He had little faith these great advances and retreats would win the war. Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf was Chief of the Austro-Hungarian General Staff, and Falkenhayn's maneuver would have had Ludendorff reporting to him. Oberost was Oberbefehlshaber der deutschen Streitkräfte im Osten — the Commander in Chief of the German armed forces in the East. Hindenburg and Ludendorff were at the beginning of their campaign against Falkenhayn. They would win it in 1916.
Suicide of the Empires by Alan Clark, page 74, copyright © 1971 by Alan Clark, publisher: American Heritage Press, publication date: 1971
(5) After heavy losses since August, 1914, with supplies of munitions low, French commander Joseph Joffre launched offensives to demonstrate French resolve and prevent the Germans from disengaging and redeploying their forces elsewhere. He used the unfortunate expression 'nibbling at the enemy' for his offensives.
They Shall Not Pass: The French Army on the Western Front 1914-1918 by Ian Sumner, page 48, copyright © Ian Sumner 2012, publisher: Pen and Sword, publication date: 2012
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