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A German soldier's pen and ink sketch of a sullen boy in a fur hat smoking a cigarette, signed F. Bloos. Message dated March 2, 1915, and field postmarked the 35 Reserve Division.
The Tiroler Volksbund — the Tyrolian People's League — kicking Italian irredentists out of the region. Bozen, Trient, and Gatren See are now Bolzano, Trento, and Lago di Garda, Italy. Die Sieben Gemeinden — the Seven Churches — was a German-speaking enclave on the Asiago plateau, and included the town of Asiago.
Prosperity and victory in 1915: an official New Year's postcard of the Bavarian Red Cross, with a message dated December 31, 1914, postmarked January 1, 1915.
Hand-painted miniatures of Mecca and the Ka'abah from the Islamic prayer book 'Prayers to Muhammed,' composed by Muhammed b. Suleyman al-Jazuli.
Socialists Karl Liebknecht and Lededur(?) struggle to restrain Imperial Germany from getting its slice of the world — Togo, Cameroon, East Africa, Southwest Africa — that other world powers carve up. France, Italy, the United States and Britain dig in.
"One night, returning from work, we found the shelter surrounded by thirty or so very young men—volunteers, or forced conscripts from the classes of 1917 and 1918 not yet called up.Skinny, beardless, and with insolent looks and talk full of the cheekiness of a Parisian Gavroche, these were what they called 'seasoned' guys, despite the fact that some of them had the faces of girls or of kids of fifteen. . . . To these kids precocious in vice, they had opened the prison gates in exchange for enlistment for the duration of the war. This was offered as a form of rehabilitation." ((1), more)
"On 25 June [1916], the Austrians withdrew to well-prepared defenses. Arsiero and Asiago were ransacked, burned and abandoned, their streets strewn with rubble, faeces and dead horses. Cadorna dissolved the Fifth Army, its task fulfilled. But the Italian counter-attacks were hasty, uncoordinated, and very costly; only a third to a quarter of the territory lost since 15 May was regained." ((2), more)
"Monday, 13th June, [O.S.; June 26, 1916, N.S.] BuchachThere were two major operations late last night, both stomach wounds; the intestines had been severely perforated and it was by no means easy to cleanse the abdominal cavity of the blood and impurities which had flowed into it. The Surgeons' skilled hands were able to cut away the torn intestinal tubes and join the healthy ends together once again. It would seem a miracle if the patient survived such an intricate operation, but a high percentage did survive and our Surgeons, who kept in touch with many of the Base hospitals, often heard that such and such a soldier was being slowly restored to health. It was a difficult time for us Sisters while these 'stomach' patients were under our care, for they were constantly crying our for water — their thirst must have exceeded their pain — and we knew that nothing must pass through those injured intestines until they had healed. It was even forbidden to allow a drop of water to pass through those parched lips." ((3), more)
"God (blessed and exalted be He) has vouchsafed the land an opportunity to rise in revolt, has enabled her by His power and might to seize her independence and crown her efforts with prosperity and victory, even after she was crushed by the maladministration of the Turkish civil and military officials. She stands quite apart and distinct from countries that still groan under the yoke of the Union and Progress Government. She is independent in the fullest sense of the word, freed from the rule of strangers and purged of every foreign influence. Her principles are to defend the faith of Islam, to elevate the Moslem people, to found their conduct on Holy Law, to build up the code of justice on the same foundation in harmony with the principles of religion, to practice its ceremonies in accordance with modern progress, and make a genuine revolution by sparing no pains in spreading education among all classes according to their station and their needs." ((4), more)
"In Germany, anti-war feeling was growing. Deaths from starvation as a result of the Allied blockade was becoming a daily occurrence. In 1915 some 88,232 deaths had been attributed to the blockade. In 1916 the number rose to 121,114. There were food riots in more than 30 German cities. On June 28 a three-day protest strike began, in which 55,000 German workers took part. The one anti-war member of the Reichstag, Karl Liebknecht, was expelled from the Reichstag and sentenced to two years' hard labour for continuing to urge soldiers not to fight. Two months later his sentence was increased to four years." ((5), more)
(1) Excerpt from the notebooks of French Infantry Corporal Louis Barthas, late June, 1916. Barthas' reserve regiment had served at Hill 304 in the Verdun sector from May 6, to May 19, 1916 where the regiment lost as many as 1,050 killed, wounded, and missing. The losses were replaced with young men, and the reserve regiment was made an active duty, regular regiment. Among the young men Barthas describes were some who had come directly from reform school, others who had pocketed some money while working, some were pimps, and one had kidnapped a girl of 14 to marry her against her parents wishes. Gavroche, to quote Barthas's translator Edward M. Strauss, is a 'character in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, the quintessential street-smart, wise-cracking urchin of Paris. [p. 401]'
Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914-1918 by Louis Barthas, pp. 225, 226, copyright © 2014 by Yale University, publisher: Yale University Press, publication date: 2014
(2) Austro-Hungarian Commander-in-Chief Conrad von Hötzendorf began his Asiago Offensive against Italy on May 15, 1916, halted it on June 16, and then pulled back to the new defensive position above. Italian Commander-in-Chief Luigi Cadorna had created the Italian Fifth Army to stop Conrad even as Russian General Alexsei Brusilov's offensive smashed through Conrad's troops on the Eastern Front.
The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1919 by Mark Thompson, page 166, copyright © 2008 Mark Thompson, publisher: Basic Books, publication date: 2009
(3) Entry for June 26, 1916 (June 13 Old Style) from the diary of Florence Farmborough, an English nurse serving with the Russian Red Cross behind the front lines of Russia's Brusilov Offensive. The next day, Farmborough and a male nurse could barely restrain one of their 'stomach patients' who was delirious from thirst.
Nurse at the Russian Front, a Diary 1914-18 by Florence Farmborough, page 202, copyright © 1974 by Florence Farmborough, publisher: Constable and Company Limited, publication date: 1974
(4) Excerpt from the June 27, 1916 proclamation of independence by Hussein ibn Ali, the Sherif of Mecca and King of Hijaz. Hussein cites the behavior of the Society of Union and Progress, the party of the Young Turks, as the justification for his declaration. The Party stripped the Sultan of his power, putting command of the Ottoman Empire in the hands of Enver Pasha, Djemal Pasha, and Talaat Bey who were responsible for the loss of the empire's territory and the impoverishment of its people. The crimes Hussein attributes to them include religious offenses, the hanging of 21 'eminent and cultured Moslems and Arabs of distinction,' and the shelling of the Kaaba in Mecca, which set its covering cloth ablaze and nearly struck the Black Stone set into one corner of the structure.
The Great Events of the Great War in Seven Volumes by Charles F. Horne, Vol. IV, 1916, p. 237, copyright © 1920 by The National Alumnia, publisher: The National Alumni, publication date: 1920
(5) Karl Liebknecht was a leader of the German Social Democratic Party, assassinated, along with Rosa Luxembourg, by right-wing thugs in 1919.
The First World War, a Complete History by Martin Gilbert, page 256, copyright © 1994 by Martin Gilbert, publisher: Henry Holt and Company, publication date: 1994
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