Search by or
Search: Quotation Context Tags
A woman munitions worker carrying a shell apparently drops another one on the foot of a frightened man who clearly does not realize, as she does, that they are not in danger. No doubt his foot hurt.
A map of the Russian-Turkish front from Der Weltkrieg 1914-1918, a 1930s German history of the war illustrated with hand-pasted cigarette cards, showing the Turkish Empire in Asia Minor and Mesopotamia, the Mediterranean, Black, and Caspian Seas and the Persian Gulf. To the west is Egypt, a British dominion; to the east Persia. Erzerum in Turkey and Kars in Russia were the great fortresses on the frontier.
Map showing the territorial gains (darker shades) of Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, and Greece, primarily at the expense of Turkey, agreed in the Treaty of Bucharest following the Second Balkan War. Despite its gains, Bulgaria also lost territory to both Romania and Turkey.
Postwar postcard map of the Balkans including Albania, newly-created Yugoslavia, expanded Romania, and diminished former Central Powers Bulgaria and Turkey. The first acquisitions of Greece in its war against Turkey are seen in Europe where it advanced almost to Constantinople, in the Aegean Islands from Samos to Rhodes, and on the Turkish mainland from its base in Smyrna. The Greco-Turkish war was fought from May 1919 to 1922. The positions shown held from the war's beginning to the summer of 1920 when Greece advanced eastward. Newly independent Hungary and Ukraine appear in the northwest and northeast.
Entrenched German soldiers behind sniper plates at Slota Gora, September 26, 1916. Slota (or Zlota) Gora was in Polish Russia, west of a line running from Warsaw to Cracow. An original watercolor (over pencil) by O. Oettel, 12th company of Landwehr, IR 32 in the field. A sketch in pencil and red crayon is on the reverse.
"The 21st. Visited the Renault factory. Thousands of women are working there on the testing and manufacture of shells and fuses. It is a painful spectacle to see women, in long rows before their lathes, making tiny machines for killing. Copper fuse rings, shrapnel bullets like pearls of steel—jewels of death." ((1), more)
"Meanwhile, the British Relief Army from India, under command of General Aylmer, was fighting its way along the desert to the relieft of Kut-al-Amara. On January 8th, this army defeated the Turks in two pitched battles at Sheikh Saad, and-by January 22d had advanced to Umm-el-Hanna, where the Turks were strongly intrenched. The British bombarded the position, but the Turkish reply was so effective that the British withdrew with heavy losses. General Aylmer was then succeeded in command by General Gorringe." ((2), more)
"The first Serb units had been shipped to Corfu on 15 January [1916], but in the course of two weeks only 15,000 troops arrived there, and Pašić had to warn again that another 140,000 people were waiting on the Albanian coast. Suffice it to say that on 23 January, the day when the Austro-Hungarian forces entered Skadar, barely one tenth of the people waiting to be rescued had been evacuated. In the meantime the exhausted and hungry Serb troops had to move from northern Albania to the safer and more secure ports of Durrës and Vlorë, which meant marching up to 250 kilometers through inhospitable terrain." ((3), more)
"The perpetual procrastination of [Prime Minister] Bratiano is placing Rumania in a dangerous position. The Central Powers are certainly beginning to adopt a threatening tone towards her. . . . 'The speedy arrival of a Russian army at the mouth of the Danube would be essential to secure us against attack by the Bulgarians in the Dobrudja,' [said Bratiano]. . . . Bratiano's private motive is only too plain: he wants to leave Russia the task of holding off the Bulgarians, so that the whole effort of the Rumanian army may be directed against Transylvania, the object of the national ambitions." ((4), more)
"January 25th.—Dolling, always watchful of the doings of enemy working-parties, had reported some new stakes. Expecting that wirers would be at work on them he and five bravoes stole across after dark. A party was seen and bombed—very successfully, judging by the cries of woe. Our guns co-operated, all but knocking our fellows' heads off. Stanway was giving occasional but deadly aid to the snipers. Once he snapped an officer where the German parapet was low. Another day he got a pheasant for the pot. He had a disconcerting habit at one time of keeping his revolver on the table when playing cards, to shoot rats as they ran along the cornice beam of the dug-out." ((5), more)
(1) Beginning of the January 21, 1916 entry from the diary of Michel Corday, a senior civil servant in the French government who contrasts the women workers with middle-class women who wonder if the soldiers at the front are 'still keen.'
The Paris Front: an Unpublished Diary: 1914-1918 by Michel Corday, page 136, copyright © 1934, by E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publisher: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publication date: 1934
(2) Attempting to capture Baghdad, the British had captured Kut-al-Amara along the way, and continued their advance. In early December, 1915 they were forced back to Kut, where they were soon surrounded by superior Turkish forces. The increasingly beleaguered force awaited the Relief Army that was stopped on January 22, 1916.
King's Complete History of the World War by W.C. King, page 219, copyright © 1922, by W.C. King, publisher: The History Associates, publication date: 1922
(3) After defeat by the combined forces of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Bulgaria, Serbia's army, government, and many civilians retreated through the mountains of Albania to the Adriatic coast. Having failed to aid Serbia with troops that had been landed in Salonica, Greece, her allies again fell short in providing food, shelter, and transport to the Serbians who had survived the winter, the mountains, and brigands that cost thousands of lives in the retreat. With Serbia defeated, Austria-Hungary invaded Montenegro, with whom the empire was at war, then neutral Albania, with whom it was not. Skadar, Durrës, and Vlorë are all Albanian cities. Nicola Pašić was Prime Minister of Serbia.
Serbia's Great War 1914-1918 by Andrej Mitrovic, page 159, copyright © Andrej Mitrovic, 2007, publisher: Purdue University Press, publication date: 2007
(4) Both the Entente Allies and Central Powers courted neutral Romania, trying to lure the country into the war, each side offering the opportunity of seizing land with large Romanian populations — Transylvania in Austria-Hungary, and Bessarabia in Russia. Romania was more interested in Transylvania, which lay across the Transylvanian Alps. The Danube River formed much of the western and southern border with Bulgaria, a not insurmountable barrier. The river flowed north then east before flowing into the Black Sea, the river and the sea shaping three sides of the Romanian eastern region of Dobrudja, which was exposed to Bulgaria along its southern border. Romania had taken the southern part of the Dobrudja from Bulgaria in the Second Balkan War in 1913.
An Ambassador's Memoirs Vol. II by Maurice Paléologue, pp. 154, 155, publisher: George H. Doran Company
(5) Excerpt from the entry for January 25, 1916 from the writings — diaries, letters, and memoirs — of Captain J.C. Dunn, Medical Officer of the Second Battalion His Majesty's Twenty-Third Foot, The Royal Welch Fusiliers. Soldier Dolling had seen the stakes that would support newly-placed barbed wire, and rightly reasoned German soldiers would string new wire at night.
The War the Infantry Knew 1914-1919 by Captain J.C. Dunn, page 178, copyright © The Royal Welch Fusiliers 1987, publisher: Abacus (Little, Brown and Company, UK), publication date: 1994
1 2 Next
