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A gleeful Russian Cossack skewers Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph in Galicia, the Empire's northeastern region isolated from the rest of the country by the Carpathian Mountains. The caption is a play on words echoing the name of the mountain range in telling Franz Joseph, 'it seems your soldiers took to their heels.' After twin defeats in the Battles of Gnila Lipa and Rava Russka, the Austro-Hungarian Army lost the great fortress at Lemberg, and was being driven out of Galicia and back through the Carpathians. Russia's attempts to break through the Carpathians continued through April 1915, with heavy losses on both sides. The Austro-Hungarians, with German support, held.
The poet, novelist, and political activist Gabriele d'Annunzio speaking in favor of Italy's entry into the war on the side of the Entente Allies, and against 'Giolittismo' at the Costanzi Theater in Rome, May, 1915. Giovanni Giolitti was five-time Prime Minister of Italy, and opposed intervention in the Great War. Illustration by Achille Beltrame.
Indian soldiers unload a wagon. The caption on the back refers to the soldiers helping the Allies by 'unloading their baggage,' but Indian soldiers fought on their own. © American Press Assciation
Chosen Boy, a 1918 watercolor by Paul Klee. From Paul Klee: Early and Late Years: 1894-1940. © 2013 Moeller Fine Art
A Russian Cossack riding among refugees fleeing before a Central Power advance. The Russians adopted a scorched-earth policy in the months-long retreat before the German-Austro-Hungarian Gorlice-Tarnow Offensive of the spring, summer, and fall 1915, with Cossacks accused of burning homes and crops to deny them to the advancing enemy, and to prevent civilians from remaining behind and providing intelligence to the invader.
"The southern portion in Eastern Galicia of the whole Russian front broke away completely from the northern. For a time there was a broad empty space in Volhynia. The break-through was accomplished. On June 22nd Lemberg fell.. . . The events which were crowned by the reoccupation of Lemberg on June 22nd, 1915, meant a great deal to the cause of the Central Powers. The threat to Hungary had been completely removed; Austria-Hungary was given the possibility of sending sufficient forces to the Italian front; Turkey was relieved from the danger of an attack upon the Bosphorus by the Russian Odessa Army; these and the pacification of Rumania and the resumption of connections with Bulgaria were the immediate and highly valuable consequences. But enough had not yet been achieved." ((1), more)
"What became the first of more than a dozen 'battles of the Isonzo' began on 23 June 1915. Enjoying numerical superiority — 18 Italian against eight Austro-Hungarian divisions — Cadorna's 460 000 soldiers of the Second and Third armies charged Archduke Eugen's Austrian positions along the Isonzo. The fighting in what Conrad called Italy's 'cowardly, despicable, treacherous predatory raid' quickly degenerated into savage hand-to-hand combat, some of it on frozen Alpine peaks in sub-zero temperatures. Both sides attacked and counterattacked, mined and countermined. Neither achieved a breakthrough. Cadorna lost 15 000 men during the First Battle of the Isonzo in June and July, and a further 42 000 during the Second Battle of the Isonzo in July and August. Another 200 000 Italian soldiers were reported either prisoners of war or simply 'missing'." ((2), more)
"On leaving St. Omer we took a short cut southward across rolling country. It was a happy accident that caused us to leave the main road, for presently, over the crest of a hill, we saw surging toward us a mighty movement of British and Indian troops. A great bath of silver sunlight lay on the wheat-fields, the clumps of woodland and the hilly blue horizon, and in that slanting radiance the cavalry rode toward us, regiment after regiment of slim turbaned Indians, with delicate proud faces like the faces of Princes in Persian miniatures. Then came a long train of artillery; splendid horses, clattering gun-carriages, clear-faced English youths galloping by all aglow in the sunset. The stream of them seemed never-ending. . . . For over an hour the procession poured by, so like and yet so unlike the French division we had met on the move as we went north a few days ago; so that we seemed to have passed to the northern front, and away from it again, through a great flashing gateway in the long wall of armies guarding the civilized world from the North Sea to the Vosges." ((3), more)
"He fell without a murmur in the noise of battle; found rest'Midst the roar of hooves on the grass, a bullet struck through his breast.Perhaps he drowsily lay; for him alone it was still,And the blood ran out of his body, it had taken so little to kill." ((4), more)
"All day long we jolted along the plains or through woodlands, and wherever we looked we could see the moving figures of homeless people. It was said that the Cossacks had received orders to force all inhabitants of villages and hamlets to leave their homes, lest they be made to act as spies and, in order that the enemy should encounter widespread devastation in his progress, the homesteads were set on fire and crops destroyed.Thus a new word was added to our daily vocabulary — that of refugee, and from that day onward for many weeks to come the life of our Unit was closely interwoven with that of the refugees. Their plight was heart-rending." ((5), more)
(1) German Commander-in-Chief Erich von Falkenhayn's summary of the effects of the Central Powers' breakthrough in the Gorlice-Tarnow Offensive, specifically the reconquest of the Austro-Hungarian fortress city of Lemberg in the province of Galicia. The Russian army was split and continued to fall back before the German and Austro-Hungarian allies through the summer and into the fall.
General Headquarters and its Critical Decisions, 1914-1916 by Erich von Falkenhayn, pp. 114, 115, copyright © 1920 by Dodd, Mead and Company, Inc., publisher: Dodd, Mead and Company, Inc., publication date: 1920
(2) Much of the Italian-Austro-Hungarian border was mountainous with the higher ground on the Austro-Hungarian side. The Isonzo River flowed through Austria-Hungary roughly along Italy's northeastern border. The First Battle of the Isonzo was soon followed by the Second. There would ultimately be twelve, the last more famously known as the Battle of Caparetto. General Luigi Cadorna was Chief of the Italian General Staff; Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf of the Austro-Hungarian.
The First World War: Germany and Austria Hungary 1914-1918 by Holger H. Herwig, page 153, copyright © 1997 Holger H. Herwig, publisher: Arnold, publication date: 1997
(3) Edith Wharton toured the Western Front in 1915, reporting from the Argonne, Alsace, Lorraine, and the Vosges. In June 1915 she went to the North and into Belgium, sectors held by the British (including Indians and Canadians) and Belgian armies. On June 19, she had stood in her car to watch 'the river of war,' French 'cavalry, artillery, lancers, infantry, sappers and miners, trench-diggers, road-makers, stretcher-bearers' streaming to the west. On June 24 she admired its British and Indian counterpart.
Fighting France by Edith Wharton, pp. 178, 179, copyright © 1915, by Charles Scribner's Sons, publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons, publication date: 1915
(4) Quatrain from the poem '1914' by Ferenc Békássy, who was killed at Dobronoutz in Bukovina, June 25, 1915. A Lieutenant in an Austro-Hungarian Hussar regiment, Békássy had studied at Cambridge College, England. A friend of John Maynard Keynes, Békássy was a rival of the English poet Rupert Brooke for the love of Noël Olivier, who went on to become a doctor. Békássy wrote in both English and Hungarian. The Hogarth Press published Adriatic and Other Poems, a volume of his English poetry, in 1925.
The Lost Voices of World War I, An International Anthology of Writers, Poets and Playwrights by Tim Cross, page 347, copyright © 1989 by The University of Iowa, publisher: University of Iowa Press, publication date: 1989
(5) Frances Farmborough, an English teacher in Moscow when war broke out, trained for and joined a Red Cross unit serving with the Russian Army. By late June, 1915, the joint German-Austro-Hungarian Gorlice-Tarnow Offensive, launched on May 2, had broken the Russian front, splitting the northern and southern armies, and driving the Russians back hundreds of miles. For these months, Farmborough's account is of the ongoing, brutal retreat.
Nurse at the Russian Front, a Diary 1914-18 by Florence Farmborough, page 83, copyright © 1974 by Florence Farmborough, publisher: Constable and Company Limited, publication date: 1974
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