Search by or
Search: Quotation Context Tags
The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg, one of Aesop's fables updated for the war by F. Sancha. In Aesop, a farmer slaughters the goose that lays a daily golden egg in expectation of seizing all its wealth at once. Sancha holds Germany responsible for the war that has destroyed its international trade, the source of its prosperity.
Machine Gun Corps Memorial, Hyde Park, London, England. A statue of David is flanked on either side by a wreathed Vickers machine gun. © 2013 by John M. Shea
La Domenica del Corriere (The Sunday Courier) of March 25 to April 1, 1917, an illustrated weekly supplement to Corriere della Sera, published in Milan, Italy. The front and back covers are full-page illustrations by the great Italian illustrator Achille Beltrame. The front cover depicts Russian troops cheering the deputies entering the Duma after what the paper calls, 'the Russian revolt for freedom and the war.' The secondary story was on the fall of Baghdad to British troops.
Russian soldiers resting in the field. Card postmarked November 28, 1916.
Re-elect President Woodrow Wilson! An October 18, 1916 cartoon from the British magazine Punch. The German sinking of ships that killed American citizens and sabotage such as the July 30, 1916 attack that destroyed the Black Tom munitions plant in Jersey City, New Jersey, were not enough to make Wilson call for a declaration of war on Germany, much to the distress of Great Britain and the other Entente allies. The date on Wilson's desk calendar is October 8, 1916, a day on which German submarine U-53 sank five vessels — three British, one Dutch, and one Norwegian — off Nantucket, Massachusetts. One of the British ships was a passenger liner traveling between New York and Newfoundland.
"S——— also mentions the extreme exhaustion of the German soldiers, who were so weakened that a retreat of twenty miles in twenty-four hours tired them out. Their only food was coffee (made with roasted barley and maize) morning and night, with a vegetable soup in the middle of the day. They tried to steal from the local population the supplies furnished by the American Relief.The whole tract is a desert. Not a single animal left alive." ((1), more)
"On 30 March 1914 I was looking forward with acute anxiety to the Atherstone point-to-point meeting (to be held next day). All my world was centred in the desire to steer old Cockbird first past the post in some silly, jolly race over hedge and ditch.And I did it. And the world went on just the same! 30 March 1916 I was in the trenches at Fricourt-Mamets, hating the Germans for killing my friend, and wondering if they'd kill me. But they didn't! And to-night I've been guzzling at the Godbert restaurant with a captain of the Dublin Fusiliers, and a captain of the Caemeronians, and three other Welsh Fusiliers; and the bill was 230 francs; and we drank Veuve Clicquot; and the others have gone into the dark city to look for harlots; and I'm alone in my room; looking out of a balconied window at the town, with few lights, and the moon and silver drifts of cloud going eastward; and the railway station looming romantic as old Baghdad. And next week we march away 'to hazards whence no tears can win us'." ((2), more)
"Saturday, March 31, 1917Anarchist propaganda has already contaminated the larger part of the front.From all quarters I am receiving reports of scenes of mutiny, the murder of officers and wholesale desertion. Even in the front line bands of private soldiers are leaving their units to go and see what is happening in Petrograd or at home in their villages." ((3), more)
"The Extremists seem to hold the Moderates in their power. That is the way with revolutions. So far it is very difficult to estimate the morale of the Army, and what tendencies will manifest themselves as a result of the latest events, under the initiative of leaders who have brought about the fall of Tsarism." ((4), more)
"With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical character of the step I am taking and of the grave responsibilities which it involves, but in unhesitating obedience to what I deem my constitutional duty, I advise that the Congress declare the recent course of the Imperial German Government to be in fact nothing less than war against the government and people of the United States; that it formally accept the status of belligerent which has thus been thrust upon it; and that it take immediate steps not only to put the country in a more thorough state of defense but also to exert all its power and all its resources to bring the Government of the German Empire to terms and end the war." ((5), more)
(1) Entries from March 29 or 30, 1917 from the diary of Michel Corday, French senior civil servant, living and writing in Paris. The 'retreat' of the German soldiers was part of Operation Alberich, a withdrawal to a shorter line and stronger defensive position, the Siegfried Zone, or Hindenburg Line. The winter of 1916–1917 was bitter, with coal and food shortages across Europe. The American Relief Committee had been founded in October, 1914 for the relief of the citizens of occupied Belgium. Its establishment by the energetic Herbert Hoover under the patronage of the Ambassadors of neutral Spain and United States is related in Hugh Gibson's animated Journal from our Legation in Belgium.
The Paris Front: an Unpublished Diary: 1914-1918 by Michel Corday, page 241, copyright © 1934, by E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publisher: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publication date: 1934
(2) Siegfried Sassoon writing on March 30, 1917 of March 30ths three years and one year before. Sassoon's trilogy, The Memoirs of George Sherston are comprised of The Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, and Sherston's Progress. After an extended medical leave in England, Sassoon had returned to the front, and was turning against the war. A point-to-point meeting is a steeplechase, a horse race that includes fence-jumping, a 'jolly race over hedge and ditch,' as in a fox hunt.Thomas Hardy's poem 'The Men Who March Away' was published in The Times of London September 9, 1914, four days after Hardy wrote it with both Hardy and the paper foregoing copyright. Sassoon had referenced the poem on January 17, 1917. The lines (line 5, repeated as line 33) Sassoon quotes, 'To hazards whence no tears can win us' is from the original. Hardy later changed it to, 'Leaving all that here can win us.' The first stanza from Hardy's Complete Poems, page 538:What of the faith and fire within us Men who march away Ere the barn-cocks say Night is growing gray,Leaving all that here can win us;What of the faith and fire within us Men who march away?
Siegfried Sassoon Diaries 1915-1918 by Siegfried Sassoon, page 146, copyright © George Sassoon, 1983; Introduction and Notes Rupert Hart-Davis, 1983, publisher: Faber and Faber, publication date: 1983
(3) Excerpt from the entry for Saturday, March 31, 1917, from the memoirs of Maurice Paléologue, French Ambassador to Russia in Petrograd, the Russian capital. In the course and immediate aftermath of the February Revolution, some officers were murdered, and some soldiers left the front.
An Ambassador's Memoirs Vol. III by Maurice Paléologue, page 277, publisher: George H. Doran Company
(4) Diary entry by Albert, King of the Belgians, for April 1, 1917, writing of the revolution in Russia where the state Duma and the Soviet contended for power. The latter was supported by much of the army and most workers.
The War Diaries of Albert I King of the Belgians by Albert I, page 162, copyright © 1954, publisher: William Kimber
(5) The paragraph from President Woodrow Wilson's April 2, 1917 address to the Congress of the United States in which he asks it to declare war on the German Empire in response to that nation's policy of unrestricted submarine warfare and the American lives that policy had taken, property it had destroyed, and rights it had restricted. In the next paragraph Wilson summarizes what 'all its power,' 'all its resources' will entail: cooperation with and financing for those governments at war with Germany, the organization and mobilization of material resources of the Unites States, 500,000 or more men raised by conscription, and government funding by 'the present generation,' that is, to the extent possible, by taxation rather than borrowing. Wilson stresses that Germany has struck at all nations, and that America will fight as one among the many nations of the world, and for democracy.
World War I and America by A. Scott Berg, page 315, copyright © 2017 by Literary Classics of the United States, publisher: The Library of America, publication date: 2017
1 2 Next
