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Pencil sketch of the village and church of Pilagra (? Pilzyra?), February 16, 1915 on field postcard.
'Scotties' from Canada. Two men of one of the Scottish regiments of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. From a Susini tobacco card.
A German farmer welcomes the Peace Tsar, Nicholas II of Russia to the home he shares with Germania and their son who bears toy weapons. The Tsar is backed by France and Great Britain, joined by Serbia and Montenegro. King Nicholas of Montenegro has his pistol at the ready, while King Peter hides behind the Tsar and conceals a smoking bomb. While the other figures are caricatures, the faces of these two kings are accurately rendered. Britain's ships are in the background. Despite the agreement of the Entente Allies to not seek a separate peace, some in Russia supported a peace agreement as early at November, 1914.
A child soldier guarding the Dardanelles, points to a sinking folded paper boat. He stands on the northern, European side; a Turkish flag flies on the southern, Asian side. He wears a Turkish fez and what may be a German naval blouse. German officers, sailors, and artillery crews supplemented the Turkish defenders of the Dardanelles. On March 18, 1915, the Turks sank or badly damaged some of the French and British warships trying to break through to Constantinople, leading the Allies to end their attempt to force the Dardanelles.
Civilians in Senlis, a destroyed town in northern France that was occupied on September 2, 1914, in the initial German advance into France, and evacuated a week later in the retreat from the Marne.
"The 9th Army is having great difficulty in extricating itself from the forest region which stretches east of Augustovo and Suvalki. At Kolno, on the Lomza road further south, one of its columns has been surrounded and destroyed. The communiqués of the Stavka are confined to an announcement that under the pressure of large forces the Russian troops are retiring to the fortified line of the Niemen. But the public understands." ((1), more)
"February 17th. [1915] — As wet as ever again. Two platoons of Canadians had been attached overnight to A Company. They took into the trench bagpipes which they played in the afternoon, much to the disturbance of the siesta of A Company's officers and to the mystification of the Germans, who kept shouting across at night : 'Are you the Jocks?' 'Are you the bloody Welch?'" ((2), more)
"It doesn't matter! We shall go through with it. If we have to retreat further we shall retreat, but I'll promise you we shall continue the war to victory. As a matter of fact, I'm only repeating to you what the Emperor and Empress said to me the day before yesterday. They're fortitude itself, both of them. Not a word of complaint or discouragement. They simply help each other to bear up. Not a soul about them, not a soul, I tell you, ever dares mention peace now!" ((3), more)
"At nine minutes to ten on the morning of February 19 [1915] the British and French fleets concentrated at the Dardanelles began the bombardment of the outer forts. . . .The attack was to be divided into two parts: first, a long-range bombardment, and second, overwhelming the forts at short range and sweeping the channel towards the entrance of the Straits." ((4), more)
"These pleasant villages of the Aisne, with their one long street, their half-timbered houses and high-roofed granaries with espaliered gable-ends, are all much of one pattern, and one can easily picture what Auve must have been as it looked out, in the blue September weather, above the ripening pears of its gardens to the crops in the valley and the large landscape beyond. Now it is a mere waste of rubble and cinders, not one threshold distinguishable from another. We saw many other ruined villages after Auve, but this was the first, and perhaps for that reason one had there, most hauntingly, the vision of all the separate terrors, anguishes, uprootings and rendings apart involved in the destruction of the obscurest of human communities. The photographs on the walls, the twigs of withered box above the crucifixes, the old wedding-dresses in brass-clamped trunks, the bundles of letters laboriously written and as painfully deciphered, all the thousand and one bits of the past that give meaning and continuity to the present — of all that accumulated warmth nothing was left but a brick-heap and some twisted stove-pipes!" ((5), more)
(1) Entry from the memoirs of Maurice Paléologue, French Ambassador to Russia, for Tuesday, February 16, 1915. German forces had surprised the Russian army in East Prussia by attacking first in a blizzard on February 7, 1915, then by attacking from the north with a new and, to the Russians unknown, army the next day. The Russian army escaped encirclement and annihilation, but with heavy losses. Stavka was the Russian General Headquarters.
An Ambassador's Memoirs Vol. I by Maurice Paléologue, page 287, publisher: George H. Doran Company, publication date: 1925
(2) Entry for February 17, 1915 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. Canada ultimately supplied four divisions — the Canadian Corps — to serve on the Western Front, originating with the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF). 'Jock' is slang for a Scot.
The War the Infantry Knew 1914-1919 by Captain J.C. Dunn, pp. 115, 116, copyright © The Royal Welch Fusiliers 1987, publisher: Abacus (Little, Brown and Company, UK), publication date: 1994
(3) Entry from the memoirs of Maurice Paléologue, French Ambassador to Russia, for Thursday, February 18, 1915. The Ambassador dined with Russian Grand Duke Paul, who lived at Tsarskoïe-Selo, the palace of Tsar Nicholas II outside St. Petersburg. Defeated in the Second Battle of the Masurian Lakes, the Russians were retreating with heavy losses including 50,000 prisoners. Many in Russia thought the Tsar's German-born wife was pro-German, and influenced the Tsar to seek a separate peace with Germany.
An Ambassador's Memoirs Vol. I by Maurice Paléologue, pp. 288, 289, publisher: George H. Doran Company, publication date: 1925
(4) Stalemated on the Western Front at the beginning of 1915, some in Britain and France looked to strike Germany's allies, Austria-Hungary and Turkey, to drive them from the war. Weakest of the Central Powers, Turkey seemed the more susceptible. Seizing the Turkish capital of Constantinople and replacing its government might bring the country to the Allied side or leave it neutral, reopening access to Russia through the Dardanelles and Bosphorus Straits. Within the British and French governments there was support for an invasion of Turkey, but also for a purely naval attempt to 'force the strait', to send a naval force to disable the forts along the Dardanelles then continue to Constantinople to seize the capital. The first naval attack was launched on February 19, 1915.
The World Crisis 1911-1918 by Winston Churchill, page 373, copyright © by Charles Scribner's Sons 1931, renewed by Winston S. Churchill 1959, publisher: Penguin Books, publication date: 1931, 2007
(5) In 1915, novelist Edith Wharton traveled and reported from behind the French front lines in Paris, Lorraine, the Vosges, northern France, and Alsace. In February she was in Argonne and saw towns and villages that had been captured in the initial German invasion of France in August 1914, then retaken by the French after their victory in the Battle of the Marne in September.
Fighting France by Edith Wharton, pp. 57, 58, copyright © 1915, by Charles Scribner's Sons, publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons, publication date: 1915
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