Mounted backwards on an ass, a bellicose Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph is borne away from Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. Austria-Hungary invaded Serbia three times in 1914. At the end of the year, the Serbians had driven them out at great cost to the invaders. Signed MT.
Via per BelgradoRoute to BelgradeMT.Reverse:LogoDepose
Black and white postcard with an embossed floral border, and a calendar for 1914. Two girls play at a water trough fashioned from a log, ribbons in their hair, and toy boats floating. On the trough, a poem:"This little card I send, and prayThat round about your path each dayThe light of love may shine alway."E. Hutchinson806J Copyright. Beagles' Postcards © Beagles' Postcards
Calendar from the French magazine Le Petit Journal with scenes including (clockwise from top left) the capture of a German battle flag by Zouaves and Chasseurs à pied, a French artillery crew manning a 75mm. field gun, a dragoon moving into position, a heavier gun firing, entrenched troops, and marines advancing. The calendar includes Roman Catholic holy days, saints days, fête nationale (Bastille Day), and the time of sunrise and sunset. Illustration by L. Bomblec (?).
Children dressed as Allied soldiers run to bring the New Year, 1916. France carries the 1, the United Kingdom (in a kilt) and Belgium — his national roundel on his hat — the 9, Serbia and Russia the 1 of the decade, and Italy the 6. Japan, bearing a flag, hurries to catch up. A folding calendar card for 1916 by G. Bertrand.Reverse: the calendar for 1916Inside:With best wishes for a happy Christmas with love from Wallis
1917 Wedgwood Calendar Tile with the United States Navy Yard in Boston on the face, and the 1917 calendar on the reverse.
1918 YMCA folding calendar card of two child French and American soldiers dancing beneath a ball of mistletoe and the words "With much Love", by Ray or R.A.Y.
"Desultory fighting round places as far apart as Obrnovats and Vishegrad continued until August 12th, when the first penetration of Austrian troops into Serbia was signaled from Losnitsa. At that town and at Leshnitsa the Thirteenth Army Corps effected a crossing, while on the same day the Fourth Army Corps crossed the Save to the north of Shabatz, and other troops on the Drina. By the 14th, over a front of about one hundred miles, six great columns had crossed the rivers and were converging on Valyevo." *
"... the Austro-Hungarian generals quite abandoned the idea of taking Belgrade by costly frontal attacks, and so they concentrated large forces, 250,000 strong, in the northwest corner of Serbia. They crossed simultaneously the rivers Drina and Save, and spread their army over a front sixty miles long. They advanced proudly into Serbia, confident that the occupation of that country was a matter of two weeks. But already some serious and bitter fighting had taken place round Shabatz, with the troops who were defending that town and the passage of the Save." *
"Upon rising the next morning, we found that about 100 versts of our journey still remained to be covered. Our train dragged along at a painful pace, stopping at every station for long, intermediary halts. On one station we made the acquaintance of three Red Cross Sisters who had been in the Retreat from Warsaw. One of them was Japanese, but spoke fluent Russian and was serving in a Russian Red Cross Unit. The elder of her companions described some of their experiences and spoke with horror of the poisonous gas employed by the Germans. In one district near Warsaw, she said, there was a field the memory of which could never be erased. It was heaped with the bodies of soldiers who had been gassed and the terrible positions of the men in death added to the ghastly spectacle: she had heard that over 6,000 men had been forced to vyyte iz stroya [fall out of formation] that day from gas alone." *
"August 12, 1916. From: Engineer Klee, Air Force Reserve Unit, Schleissheim, Workshop Company. To: Frau Lily Klee, Munich, Ainmillerstrasse 32, second floor in the garden pavilion. 'What a disappointment that you didn't come. Well, let us hope for Sunday; saw Stubenvoll, promised he'd help. But sleeping outside camp is impossible. Will you find a place? Everything is said to be full to overflowing with pilots. We'll see. They have me varnishing wings. It isn't exactly dangerous. But suddenly to be turned into a factory worker, how adventurous! And the garb! Yours, Paul.'" *
"After Haig launched his Flanders offensive at the end of July 1917, Kleine was directed by OHL to bomb British ports. . . .Kleine's first chance came on 12 August, when Georgii's forecast seemed to permit a flight. The surprised crews were not notified until early afternoon. Since it was a Sunday, many of the airmen had already left to spend the day in Ghent. Kleine could put up only thirteen bombers, but he had them in the air in less than an hour with Oberleutnant Richard Walter, the Führer of Staffel 15, flying in the lead. The objective, decided well in advance, was the British naval base at Chatham. Southend and Margate-Westgate were assigned as secondary targets." *
"Within the space of five days the town of Amiens and the railway centering upon it had been disengaged. Twenty German Divisions had been heavily defeated by thirteen British Infantry Divisions and three Cavalry Divisions, assisted by a regiment of the 33rd American Division and supported by some 400 Tanks. Nearly 22,000 prisoners and over 400 guns had been taken by us, and our line had been pushed forward to a depth of some twelve miles in a vital sector. Further, our deep advance, combined with the attacks of the French Armies on our right, had compelled the enemy to evacuate hurriedly a wide extent of territory to the south of us." *
* Quotation contexts and sources
During the four and half years of the Great War from the summer of 1914 to November 11, 1918, over eight million combatants and six million civilians died. In battle, they were killed by new and increasingly powerful weapons, 70% by artillery fire, and in higher percentages than in Europe's wars of the previous century. Civilians died from starvation, from being shelled and bombed, and from genocidal operations against ethnic minorities.
In the war and its aftermath, the empires of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Turkey were destroyed, and new nations were born and reborn.
New technologies were invented and young ones advanced rapidly - the airplane, poison gas, the machine gun, the tank, flame-throwers, submarines. Industrial production of the technologies, of shells, of bullets, of barbed wire, grew to unprecedented levels.
Societies changed. Women entered the wage labor market to free men up for combat and to meet the production demands of the war. Passports, identity cards, and increased border controls became increasingly common.
When the war itself ended, related wars continued: in Russia, Civil War between the new Bolshevik government and its enemies, both foreign and domestic; in Turkey, war by Greece to seize islands in the Aegean Sea and parts of the mainland of Turkey itself; in Ireland, war for independence from Great Britain.
On Sunday, June 28, 1914, in the city of Sarajevo, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a province of Austria-Hungary, a team of seven conspirators with grenades, pistols and cyanide capsules/tablets, joined the crowds that had turned out to see Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and his wife Sophie von Hohenberg. A failed assassination attempt - a grenade that slightly wounded spectators and two in the royal couple's entourage - altered some plans and led to other events. A planned visit to City Hall went ahead, but a decision to visit the victims in hospital necessitating a changed route, a failure to inform the drivers of the change, the lead driver's attempt to back to correct the mistake - put the Archduke's stopped car in front of the most determined of the assassins, the Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip. He stepped forward, averted his eyes, and fired twice, shooting the Archduke through the throat and his wife through the groin. The couple was dead within an hour. The gun, the bombs, the cyanide Princip took, and some of the conspirators would be traced to Serbia.
The Archduke was not popular in Austria-Hungary, and the reaction to his death was muted. But Austria-Hungary was a multi-ethnic, polyglot nation with populations that wanted to leave the empire. Princip had acted to advance his vision of a union of South Slavs that included Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. In Vienna, the capital, government officials feared the rise of Serbia, which had been victorious and doubled its size in the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913.
Initial concerns in other European capitals of an Austro-Hungarian response to the assassination lessened as July passed. In Petersburg, the Russian capital, government officials felt they must support Serbia if Austria-Hungary acted. The French and Russian governments communicated their support of their alliance and mutual commitment to aid the other in the event of war. The government of Great Britain, the third member of the Triple Entente with Russia and France, heard little that alarmed it. In Berlin, capital of the German Empire, which was allied with Austria-Hungary and Italy in the Triple Alliance, there was support for a quick and limited military action by Austria-Hungary.
Defeated by Japan in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, and humiliated in 1908 when it failed its Balkan ally Serbia, and did not prevent Austria-Hungary's incorporation of Slavic Bosnia-Herzegovina, many government officials in Russia felt the country must act in the next crisis when it inevitably arose. Many in the French government wanted to restore the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine it had lost to Germany in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, but feared a Germany that had a population half again as large as that of France, and worked to strengthen its ties with Russia, in part by financing its ally's rapid recovery from the 1905 war. Having seen the creation and rise of the Balkan states of Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Montenegro, Albania, and Greece, that had all wrested land and nationhood from the Ottoman Empire, and had come close to eliminating Turkey in Europe, Austria-Hungary feared losing its peoples and territories to these nations and to nations that did not yet exist. Great Britain, with the most powerful fleet in the world, and rule over one quarter of the world's population, but with a small army that was not structured for a European land war, was troubled by Germany's expansion and strengthening of its fleet. Many in the German military thought that war with Russia was inevitable, and that, with the recovery of Russia from the war and revolution of 1915, it should come sooner rather than when Russia had become even stronger. The military also feared a two-front war, facing France to the west, and Russia to the east. The military plan to address this, the Schlieffen Plan, aimed for a rapid defeat of France so that troops could be transported by rail across Germany to face the slowly-mobilizing Russians.
When Austria-Hungary's response to evidence that Serbia had played a role in the assassination came, there was little time for governments to react. Austria-Hungary submitted demands of Serbia that included unconditional acceptance within 24 hours. As European governments learned of the response, and hurried to react, Serbia accepted all by one of Austria-Hungary's demands, that which most impinged upon its sovereignty. The ambassador receiving the response left immediately for Vienna. On July 28, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and on the next day bombarded Belgrade, its capital.
Russia mobilized its army in support of Serbia, but with a mobilization plan that activated troops facing not only Austria-Hungary but also Germany. On August 1, Germany declared war on Russia and invaded Luxemburg to begin its assault on France. France ordered general mobilization effective August 2, and began executing its plan to attack Germany along their border, through Alsace and Lorraine. On August 3, Germany declared war on France, and requested passage of its troops through Belgium to attack France along its northern border. Belgium, defending the neutrality that France, Germany, and Great Britain had pledged to support, refused. On August 4, Germany invaded Belgium. In Great Britain, where there was significant opposition to the war, the invasion of Belgium shifted the opinion of the public and the government. Britain declared war on Germany.
Across Europe, millions of men were in motion, on trains, horseback, and on foot. France and Britain were bringing troops and laborers from its colonies and the British Commonwealth, France from Algeria, Senegal, and Dahomey, Britain from Egypt and India. Generals had not assembled armies this large before, and had not put them into motion, nor led them into battle. Most generals, most soldiers, most civilians thought the war would end in months, that their their army would be in Berlin, in Paris, in Petersburg, by Christmas, before 1915. Only a few saw this war would be different, and would not end for years.
