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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.
Damaged British Tank, one tread partially off, painted with a Maltese cross, in Champagne. A soldier lies beside it.
Town clock and Harbor, Halifax, Nova Scotia look to the east.
Western Ottoman Empire showing the travels of Rafael De Nogales, Inspector-General of the Turkish Forces in Armenia and Military Governor of Egyptian Sinai during the World War, from his book Four Years Beneath the Crescent.
Map of Syria, Palestine, Turkey, and Mesopotamia from the Baedeker 1912 travel guide Palestine and Syria with Routes through Mesopotamia and Babylonia and with the Island of Cyprus.
"[Austro-Hungarian Emperor] Karl on 4 December [1917] called a meeting of military leaders. Szurmay reiterated the demand for a separate Hungarian army and informed those present that 'all groups' in Budapest were 'united on the issue of a Hungarian army'. General Sarkotić, the Croat wartime leader of Bosnia-Herzegovina, countered that Szurmay's demands were inadmissible and instead argued for a 'small unitary army' designed to 'repress revolutionary subversions and coups'. . . . War Minister Stöger-Steiner defused a potentially explosive situation by suggesting that Karl bow to the inevitable on the issue of a separate Hungarian army, but that he do so in such a manner as to turn its creation into a 'genuine coronation of dualism'. In any case, Stöger-Steiner lectured the council, such a step would have to wait until the end of the war. General Dankl, colonel of the Leibgarden, closed the meeting on a true Habsburg note by muttering 'later, much later' in support of the War Minister's decision to delay the issue." ((1), more)
"December 5th [1917].—What is to be thought of the Cambrai affair the Staff seemed so proud of, and of which others were so hopeful until word of the stickiness of the cavalry, and of their mishandling, leaked out? We were left in a bad salient. And now! Above—slackness and want of supervision, below—panic affecting several brigades, have undone everything; the fleeing infantry uncovered their guns." ((2), more)
"At sea, the convoy system had begun to serve the Allied powers well. November's shipping losses were the lowest of the year, with 126 ships being sunk, fifty-six of them British. From the United States, four American battleships joined the British Grand Fleet that December. A massive 'shipbuilding crusade' was under way in the United States, to provide the merchant shipping needed for the war in 1918. There was a disaster for the Allies on December 6, many thousands of miles from the war zones: in the Canadian harbour of Halifax, a French merchant ship, the Mont Blanc, loaded with munitions for Europe, collided with a Belgian vessel and blew up. More than 1,600 people were killed and 9,000 injured: one in five of the city's population." ((3), more)
"The date for the attack on Jerusalem was fixed as December 8th. Welsh troops, with a cavalry regiment attached, had advanced from their positions north of Beersheba up the Hebron-Jerusalem road on the 4th. No opposition was met, and by the evening of the 6th the head of this column was ten miles north of Hebron. The infantry was directed to reach the Bethlehem-Beit Jala area by the 7th, and the line Surbahir-Sherafat (about three miles south of Jerusalem) by dawn on the 8th, and no troops were to enter Jerusalem during this operation. . . .On the 7th the weather broke, and for three days rain was almost continuous. The hills were covered with mist at frequent intervals, rendering observation from the air and visual signaling impossible. A more serious effect of the rain was to jeopardize the supply arrangement by rendering the roads almost impassable—quite impassable, indeed, for mechanical transport and camels in many places." ((4), more)
"On the morning of December 8th [1917] large numbers of the inhabitants, with the remaining religious chiefs, were personally warned by the police to be ready to leave at once. The extent to which the Turks were prepared to clear the city is shown by the fact that out of the Armenian community of 1,400 souls 300 received this notice. The tyrannical Djemal Pasha, when warned that vehicles were unavailable for the transport of the unhappy exiles to Shechem or Jericho, telegraphed curtly that they and theirs must walk. The fate of countless Armenians and many Greeks has shown that a population of all ages suddenly turned out to walk indefinite distances under Turkish escort is exposed to outrage and hardship which prove fatal to most of them; but the delay in telegraphing had saved the population, and the sun had risen for the last time on the Ottoman domination of Jerusalem, and the Turks' power to destroy faded with the day." ((5), more)
(1) Karl, Emperor of Austria and Apostolic King of Hungary, inherited his thrones from Franz Joseph after the latter's death in November, 1916. Incompetent leadership on the battlefield, an inability to produce adequate materiel for war or adequate food for civilians and soldiers alike, and increasing national aspirations in its ethnic groups were driving the Empire to its dissolution. The two nations of the Empire, Austria and Hungary, shared a head of state and ministries of foreign affairs, finance, and defense. The countries had separate parliaments (in Vienna and Budapest) and prime ministers. Szurmay was Minister for the Honvéd, the equivalent of Austria's Landwehr, the territorial or national guard.
The First World War: Germany and Austria Hungary 1914-1918 by Holger H. Herwig, page 353, copyright © 1997 Holger H. Herwig, publisher: Arnold, publication date: 1997
(2) Entry for December 5, 1917 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, and fellow soldiers who served with him. The British launched the largest tank offensive yet seen on November 20, 1917 with three tank brigades, 380 tanks in all, near Cambrai, France. The first day was a success, with an advance of as much as 4½ miles on a 6-mile front. With no fresh reinforcements, specifically none trained to coordinate with tanks, the advance bogged down, with the role of the tanks diminishing. Failures of the British to achieve their goals and a German counterattack on November 30 left the British in an exposed salient. British commander General Douglas Haig ordered a withdrawal beginning the night of December 4–5. In The Tank Corps, Major Clough Williams-Ellis reports that the order to retreat was not communicated to the Tank Corps, then in the process of repairing tanks that had to be abandoned.
The War the Infantry Knew 1914-1919 by Captain J.C. Dunn, pp. 420–421, copyright © The Royal Welch Fusiliers 1987, publisher: Abacus (Little, Brown and Company, UK), publication date: 1994
(3) In Over Here 1914–1918, Mark Sullivan describes the 'Belgian vessel' as a Belgian relief ship, and reports that two square miles of Halifax were destroyed. A train of provisions, supplies, and relief personnel left Boston, Massachusetts the night of the explosion. Delayed by a blizzard, it arrived in Halifax on the 8th. The success of the convoy system thwarted the primary aim of the German policy of unrestricted submarine warfare: to drive Britain out of the war before the United States could build up adequate forces in Europe to prevent the defeat of France.
The First World War, a Complete History by Martin Gilbert, page 387, copyright © 1994 by Martin Gilbert, publisher: Henry Holt and Company, publication date: 1994
(4) Excerpt from the account by British General Edmund Allenby of the advance through Palestine on Jerusalem in December, 1917. The British advance from Egypt had been halted at Gaza, where the Turks were twice victorious early in the year, but the Turks lost the city and the Third Battle of Gaza on November 6.
The Great Events of the Great War in Seven Volumes by Charles F. Horne, Vol. V, 1917, pp. 406–407, copyright © 1920 by The National Alumnia, publisher: The National Alumni, publication date: 1920
(5) Excerpt from the account of 'an eye-witness within Jerusalem' of events in the city on December 8, 1917. After capturing the city of Gaza on November 6, in their third attempt, British forces had steadily progressed north through Palestine. During the war, Greeks and other ethnic and religious minorities of the Ottoman Empire had been roughly treated by government forces, but not with the genocidal frenzy unleashed on Turkish Armenians. Forced marches into hostile populations and the dessert were one of the government tools of genocide. The triumvirate of War Minister Enver Pasha, Minister of the Interior Mehmed Talaat, and Naval Minister Ahmed Djemal Pasha ruled Turkey and the Empire throughout the war. Talaat was the most implacable against the Armenians.
The Great Events of the Great War in Seven Volumes by Charles F. Horne, Vol. V, 1917, pp. 405–406, copyright © 1920 by The National Alumnia, publisher: The National Alumni, publication date: 1920
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