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Pope Benedict XV, holding a basket of olive leaves, uses a megaphone to address troops fighting — shooting, bayoneting, using rifles as clubs — in uniforms of France, Germany, Turkey, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Australia.Title at the top:A Päpa Bëkeszözata 1917The Pope's Words of Peace, 1917At the bottom:XV Benedek Vigëcz:Pardon Uraim! Szëp Müpätmät tesseneh. . . The Pope issued his message on August 1, 1917.Watercolor postcard by Schima Martos.
1898 map of St. Petersburg, the Russian capital, from a German atlas. Central St Petersburg, or Petrograd, is on the Neva River. Key landmarks include the Peter and Paul Fortress, which served as a prison, Nevski Prospect, a primary boulevard south of the Fortress, the Finland Train Station, east of the Fortress, where Lenin made his triumphal return, the Tauride (Taurisches) Palace, which housed the Duma and later the Petrograd Soviet.
Salonica (Thessaloniki), a base of Allied operations in the Balkans, suffered enormous damage in the fire of August 18, 19, and 20, 1917. In the postcard, the Quay: Olympos-Palace.
Italian Front: Birdseye view relief map of the Italian-Austro-Hungarian border and battlezone from Udine in the west to Trieste in the East, and looking north from the Adriatic to the Alps. It includes the city of Goriza, Karfreit (Caporetto), and labeled mountain peaks.
Stereo card of French Generals, Henri Philippe Pétain, Paul Henrys, and Émile Fayolle and French Raymond President Poincaré in the Verdun sector. Pétain is on the left and Poincaré behind him. Henrys is in the foreground, back to the camera, and Fayolle on the right.
"For one blinding moment the evil sorcery, the taboo, about discussing peace was broken. August 16 [1917] Pope Benedict XV sent from the Vatican a note to all belligerent governments crying out against the war: 'Shall, then, the civilized world be naught but a field of death? And shall Europe, so glorious and flourishing, rush, as though driven by universal madness, toward the abyss, and lend her hand to her own suicide?' He suggested broad means of ending the conflict and settling the issues. The Times denounced the note as 'pro-German and anti-Ally . . . permeated with German ideas.' Every major power on both sides rejected it. The fighting would go on until somebody won. At Birkenhead Lloyd George estimate in an impromptu speech that 'we shall just win,' to which the Nation, that irreverent organ of the Left, innocently asked, 'Win What?'" ((1), more)
"[Kornilov] wanted the right to shoot deserters and mutineers, and he proposed a far more rigid control of the political commissars and soldiers' committees at the front. In the rear he wanted to exercise military discipline on the railways, the arsenals and the munition factories: and there is no doubt he was justified in urging reforms. When Kerensky hesitated the general proceeded to Petrograd to have the matter out, and everything in the capital, even Kerensky himself, filled him with anger and disgust. On his return to his headquarters at Mogilev on August 17 he declared to his staff that the only way to clean things up was to hang Lenin and disperse the Soviets before they could engineer another rising." ((2), more)
"The Great Fire [of Salonica] began in the middle of the afternoon siesta on August 18 [1917] up in the oldest quarter, where jutting stories jostled each other so closely that the narrow street became a wood-roofed arcade. After four rainless months every balcony was tinder dry, and with a fierce northwest wind blowing, the city had as little hope of escaping destruction as Chicago in 1871 or London in 1666. The two oval watering tanks, which formed the municipal fire brigade, were hurriedly pulled up the steep alleys by a noisy and confused crowd of men and boys. But this was little more than a pathetic gesture. Soon people were pouring out of their houses, loading possessions onto donkeys or into carts or dragging beds and clothes and household utensils after them in a panic flight toward the waterfront. With virtually no water in the upper town, the walls in street after street began to crash as though they were trees in a flaming forest." ((3), more)
"The month of the most continuously fierce fighting in the whole Italian war opened on August 18, 1917, with a general bombardment from Tolmino to the sea. The guns massed along the Corada ridge searched the Austrian positions beyond the Isonzo. Next day, along the front from Plava northwards to Doblar, the infantry bridged and crossed the rapid river in face of the enemy, and began to ascend the eastern bank of the gorge. A more difficult operation, in face of machine-gun posts and a determined foe entrenched in ground of such vantage, has seldom been allotted to any force in the world war." ((4), more)
"At 4:30 A.M. on August 20 [1917], eight divisions of French infantry swept forward. By August 26 they had driven the Germans off the heights and had captured ten thousand prisoners and hundreds of artillery pieces and machine guns. The French bombardment had been overwhelming. More than a thousand Germans died when one tunnel in the Mort Homme defenses was sealed up by accurate gunfire. And now, his objective accomplished, Pétain stopped the attack. His troops were amazed—'it has been too easy!'—and, as their trucks drove back from the victorious assault, observers marveled that men 'were singing, bursting with enthusiasm, their faces radiant with hope!'" ((5), more)
(1) In August 1917 the war had been going on for three years for most combatants, and calls for peace came from numerous sources. Germany had floated a peace proposal in December 1916. President Woodrow Wilson had done the same at the same time. The Russian Revolution in March 1917 and the French army mutinies in the spring and summer had both been in part driven by demands for peace. Desertion rates were up in France and Italy and endemic in Russia where thousands of soldiers simply left the front.
In Flanders Fields, the 1917 Campaign by Leon Wolff, page 160, copyright © 1958 by Leon Wolff, publisher: The Viking Press, publication date: 1958
(2) Alexander Kerensky, already War Minister, became Prime Minister on July 20, 1917 even as his offensive, launched on July 1, was ending in defeat and retreat. Alexsei Brusilov, commander in chief of the Russian armies, was replaced by General Lavr Kornilov. Kronilov had supported Russia's February Revolution earlier in the year, but insisted on abolishing some of the reforms the Revolution had implemented, such as the abolishment of the death penalty for desertion. He also wanted to restrict the power of the soviets among the soldiers. In August, after a government attack on the Bolsheviks, their leader Vladimir Lenin had fled Petrograd and was in hiding in Russia's semi-autonomous region of Finland.
The Russian Revolution by Alan Moorehead, page 217, copyright © 1958 by Time, Inc., publisher: Carroll and Graf, publication date: 1989
(3) The Great Fire of Salonica broke out on August 18, 1917, apparently ignited by a small cooking fire. People who fled to the waterfront for safety found themselves threatened from land and sea when petrol from a burning ship set the surface of the harbor near them ablaze. The port of Salonica, Greece, was the primary port for the Allied armies — French, British, Serbian, Russian, and Greek — on the Salonica Front.
The Gardeners of Salonika by Alan Palmer, page 152, copyright © 1965 by A. W. Palmer, publisher: Simon and Schuster, publication date: 1965
(4) Italian commander in chief Luigi Cadorna's Eleventh Battle of the Isonzo came at a time when Italian moral was low, and desertion rates climbing. Tolmino, Austria-Hungary, now (2017) Tolmin, Slovenia, is situated at the confluence of the Tolminka and Isonzo Rivers. The latter flowed through Austro-Hungarian territory just east of its border with Italy to the Adriatic Sea. Much of the battle took place along ridges two to three thousand feet high. Our excerpt is from an account of 11th Isonzo by Dr. G. M. Trevelyan, head of the British Red Cross in Italy during the campaign.
The Great Events of the Great War in Seven Volumes by Charles F. Horne, Vol. V, 1917, p. 306, copyright © 1920 by The National Alumnia, publisher: The National Alumni, publication date: 1920
(5) In ending the French army mutinies, commander in chief Henri Pétain had promised his army that he would make greater use of artillery and other weapons before any infantry assault, and that his objectives would be clear and limited. His offensive at Verdun in August, 1917 met these conditions, and demonstrated how successful they could be. His soldiers responded, seeing that every battle need not be a slaughter. Pétain was recapturing territory lost in the German siege of 1916, and providing support for British commander Douglas Haig's offensive in Flanders, the Third Battle of Ypres.
Dare Call it Treason by Richard M. Watt, page 225, copyright © 1963 by Richard M. Watt, publisher: Simon and Schuster, publication date: 1963
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