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'December snow.' Hand-painted watercolor calendar for December 1917 by Schima Martos. Particulates from a smoking kerosene lamp overspread the days of December, and are labeled 'December höra,' 'December snow.' The first five days or nights of the month show a couple at, sitting down to, or rising from a lamp-lit table. The rest of the month the nights are dark, other than four in which the quarter of the moon shows through a window, or Christmas, when the couple stands in the light of a Christmas tree.
Neutral Netherlands commiserates with its invaded, war-battered neighbor Belgium. One of a series of 1916 postcards on neutral nations by Em. Dupuis.
England's Distress: Postcard map of England and Ireland with the restricted zone Germany proclaimed around the islands, showing the ships destroyed by submarine in the 12 months beginning February 1, 1917.
Map of the Eastern Front, mid-July, 1915 from The Capture of Novo Georgievsk, Volume 8 of the Reichsarchive history Battles of the World War.
French infantry charge near Fort Vaux, one of the bastions of Verdun. In March 1916, the village of Vaux changed hands 13 times. The fort fell to German forces the morning of June 7.Illustration by Léon Taa. . . ., 1916.
"What a to-do in town today! There was a whole crowd of women in front of the baker's shop chattering excitedly and waving their bread cards. They were abusing the baker and blaming the bakeries for all the shortages. Then along came a policeman who tried to calm the crowd. The policeman — I know him, and he's a horrible man, very bad manners — grabbed a fat woman who was carrying a milk can. She fell down and there was pandemonium. The fat woman got back on her feet, raised her milk can and smashed it into the policeman's face. Then all the women jumped on the policeman. The baker saved the day by opening his shop. The mob stormed inside. I heard them shouting for a long time. Bread! Give us bread! Our children need something to eat!" ((1), more)
"The sharpened U-boat offensive was once again curtailed by diplomatic rather than military factors. The neutral Dutch were hard hit. On 16 March the Royal Holland Lloyd liner Tubantia (13,911 tons), outward bound for Buenos Aires, was torpedoed and sunk near the North Hinder light vessel by UB.13. The Tubantia was the largest neutral ship sunk by submarines during the war. Two days later the Germans sank another Dutch steamer, the Royal Rotterdam Lloyd liner Palembang (6,674 tons). The Dutch packets that plied the North Sea between the Netherlands and Great Britain were decimated by German actions." ((2), more)
"Friday 17 March, St Patrick's Day, seemed appropriate for the German Admiral Staff to run through the expedition to Ireland.Haughwitz explained that a steamer of 1,400 tons would depart on 8 April and arrive in Tralee Bay between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. A pilot boat would guide it in.. . .Still hoping for a U-boat, Casement wrote in his diary:'St. Patrick's Day. In three weeks from today I shall probably be at sea in the most ill-planned enterprise that the history of Irish Revolutionary efforts offers.'. . . Tension was high in Dublin city centre on St. Patrick's Day.The Irish Volunteers and the Citizen Army paraded with rifles and fixed bayonets. Some of them had six-foot long pikes which they stacked outside church during Mass." ((3), more)
"The offensive was carried out at a time of year that could not have been less suitable if it had been chosen by the Germans. It opened on 18th March [1916]. The winter conditions had given way to those of early spring — alternating freezes and thaws that made the roads either an ice-rink or a morass. Shell would explode to little effect against ground that was either hard as iron or churned to a morass; gas was also ineffective in the cold. Supplies presented problems that the best-trained army would have found impossible to solve: the man-handling of boxes of heavy shell through slush that was a foot deep. The Russian rear was a scene of epic confusion — complicated by the astonishingly large masses of cavalry deployed there, to no effect whatsoever at the front. It was altogether an episode that suggests commanders had lost such wits as they still possessed." ((4), more)
"'. . . the English are arriving here every day.'. . . 'I can't wait to find out where you are going there are a great many from around here who write to say that they are going to Verdun you already know . . . but as for me when will I know too. H. hasn't written for more than a week and he usually writes every day Is it the change of location or has something happened to him everyone wants to know.' . . . 'B's son who belonged to the Twelfth at Notre-Dame-de-Lorette has been at Verdun for the past week.'" ((5), more)
(1) Excerpt from the diary of Piete Kuhr, then a 14-year old German schoolgirl living in Schneidemühl in East Prussia. The British blockade of Germany led to rationing by early 1916.
Intimate Voices from the First World War by Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Wallis, pp. 237, 239, copyright © 2003 by Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Wallis, publisher: Harper Collins Publishers, publication date: 2003
(2) After German submarines began sinking shipping around the British Isles in 1914, Great Britain declared the entire North Sea a military zone effective November 5, and imposed a blockade of Germany. On February 4, 1915, Germany announced a campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare in which ships of Britain and its allies were subject to sinking without notice, the campaign becoming effective on February 18. Germany accused Britain of false-flagging its merchant ships, sailing them under the flags of neutral nations to avoid being attacked. Britain both armed merchant ships, and used decoy merchant ships, the armed Q ships, to lure submarines before opening fire on them. Neutral nations protested against both Britain's and Germany's policies, but particularly the latter, which led to significant losses of life. On May 7, 1915, German submarine U-20 sank the passenger liner Lusitania, killing 1,195 civilians, 128 of them Americans. Responding to American protests, and fearful of drawing in into the war, Germany restricted its campaign at the end of August 1915, but did not end it. Neutral Netherlands was a significant trading partner with Germany, but was subject to the British blockade of the North Sea.
A Naval History of World War I by Paul G. Halpern, page 307, copyright © 1994 by the United States Naval Institute, publisher: UCL Press, publication date: 1994
(3) Sir Roger Casement, an Irish Patriot who had been knighted for his exposure of the atrocities committed by the government in the Belgian Congo, had been struggling to raise an Irish Regiment to fight for Irish independence from the Irish prisoners of war in Germany. He had few takers. Police reported 4,555 had marched in Dublin, of whom 1,817 were armed, half with rifles, the rest with shotguns. The Irish Citizen Army was organized by James Connolly after the failed Dublin strike of 1913 to protect trade union members. The Irish Volunteers were founded the same year in response to the formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force, a well-armed Unionist army with strong support from the military. German plans called for a steamer to deliver to Ireland 20,000 captured Russian rifles, a million rounds of ammunition, and 400 kilograms of explosives.
Rebels: The Irish Rising of 1916 by Peter de Rosa, pp. 111, 112, copyright © 1990 by Peter de Rosa, publisher: Ballantine Books, publication date: 1992
(4) The Battle of Lake Narotch was Russia's response to the French requests for offensives by its allies to draw German forces from the siege at Verdun. Russian industry, supplemented by imports from Japan and the United States, was finally able to produce weapons and materiel that could meet the demands of the war. The Russians were numerically superior to the German defenders. Historian Norman Stone calls the offensive the last of the old Russian army — an army commanded by old men fighting the wars of the last century, who had learned little during the current war, where dismissals for incompetence could be overridden by appeals to the Tsar, where artillery and infantry did not coordinate their efforts.
The Eastern Front, 1914-1917 by Norman Stone, page 228, copyright © 1975 Norman Stone, publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons, publication date: 1975
(5) Excerpts from letters by Paul Pireaud and his wife Marie, the first paragraph from Paul, the second from his wife, both from March, 1916. Paul was with the 112th Heavy Artillery Regiment which was about to be transferred to Verdun where the battle for the sector had been in progress since February 21. Commanding the defense, French General Henri Philippe Pétain kept the sector supplied and reinforced, rotating men and units through in roughly eight days. To free French troops for service at Verdun, the British were extending their line. Notre-Dame-de-Lorette is in Artois, and had been the site of Battles of Artois in 1914 and 1915. Marie's punctuation is minimal.
Your Death Would Be Mine; Paul and Marie Pireaud in the Great War by Martha Hanna, pp. 95, 96, copyright © 2006 by Martha Hanna, publisher: Harvard University Press, publication date: 2006
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