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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.
Wooden cigarette box carved by Г. САВИНСКИ (?; G. Savinskiy), a Russian POW. The Grim Reaper strides across a field of skulls on the cover. The base includes an intricate carving of the years of war years, '1914' and, turning it 90 degrees, '1918.'
German postcard map of the Western Front in Flanders, looking south and including Lille, Arras, Calais, and Ostend. In the Battle of the Yser in October, 1914, the Belgian Army held the territory south of the Yser Canal, visible between Nieuport, Dixmude, and Ypres (Ypern). Further north is Passchendaele, which British forces took at great cost in 1917.
"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!" ((1), 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." ((2), 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!" ((3), more)
"From battle-casualties and stragglers, regiments ran down to a few hundreds, instead of three thousand men — in the case of 105th Orenburg regiment to less than a hundred. On 21st February [1915] Bulgakov surrendered with 12,000 men, most of them wounded. This was given out by Ludendorff as a new Tannenberg, and so it appears in his memoirs. There was talk of 100,000 prisoners; in practice, the figure was 56,000 for losses of all types in the Russian X Army, although since most of 20. Corps's guns were lost, the Germans took 185 guns. German losses have not been revealed." ((4), more)
"Calais, a town with 66,627 inhab., including St. Pierre-lès-Calais (p. 5), and a fortress of the first class, derives its chief importance from its harbour and its traffic with England, to which it is the nearest port on the French coast. The chalk cliffs and castle of Dover, 21 M. distant, are visible in clear weather. About 300,000 travellers pass through the town annually; and in addition there is a brisk trade in timber, coal, etc. Calais contains 1500 English residents, chiefly engaged in its tuile-manufactories (p. 5).Calais played a prominent part in the early wars between France and England. Its harbour was the rendezvous for the fleet of the Dauphin Louis, who aid had been invited by the discontented English barons against King John. In 1346-47, after the battle of Crécy, Edward III starved it into surrender after a desperate resistance of eleven months. He consented to spare the town on condition that six noble citizens should place themselves, clad in their shirts and with halters around their necks, at his absolute disposal; and it was only by the urgent intercession of his queen, Philippa of Hainault, that he was induced to spare the lives of the unfortunate men, at whose head was the patriotic Eustache de St. Pierre. Calais remained in the hands of the English until 1558, when the Duke of Guise with 30,000 men succeeded in expelling the small English garrison (500 men) after a siege of seven days. In 1560 Mary Stuart set sail from Calais to assume the Scottish crown; and in 1814 Louis XVIII landed here on his return to his kingdom. The Spaniards made themselves masters of Calais in 1596, but the treaty of Vervins in 1598 restored it permanently to France." ((5), more)
(1) 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
(2) 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
(3) 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
(4) German forces had surprised the Russian army in East Prussia by attacking first from the west in a blizzard on February 7, 1915, then by attacking the next day from the north with a new and, to the Russians unknown, army. The Russian army escaped encirclement and annihilation, but 20th Corps, under General Bulgakov, did not. In the Battle of Tannenberg at the end of August, 1914, German Generals von Hindenburg and Ludendorff destroyed the Russian Second Army, and took 90,000 prisoners.
The Eastern Front, 1914-1917 by Norman Stone, page 118, copyright © 1975 Norman Stone, publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons, publication date: 1975
(5) A Zeppelin bombed Calais, the Channel port closest to England, through which much of the traffic between England and France flowed, at about 5:00 AM the morning of February 2, 1915. Reports differ on the number of bombs, five or ten, but agree they killed five civilians: an octogenarian, a young girl, and a mother, father, and one of their two children, leaving a baby unharmed. (See paperspast.natlib.govt.nz.)
Northern France from Belgium and the English Channel to the Loire Excluding Paris and its Environs; Handbook for Travellers by Karl Baedeker, Fifth Edition with 16 Maps and 55 Plans by Karl Baedeker, pp. 3, 4, copyright © 1909, publisher: Karl Baedeker, Publisher, publication date: 1909
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