French postcard celebrating the Allied victory at the Battle of the Marne with the Kaiser tumbling in the river, Germans (in green) fleeing. The French in blue and red advance and tend to German wounded. The British, France's ally, advance in the distance.
Caption:Dans un élan magnifique, les armées allemandes on passé deux fois la Marne. Tout va bien. Les troupes sont fraîches. (Agence Wolff)With magnificent élan, the German armies have crossed the Marne twice. All is well. The troops are fresh. (Wolff Agency)Signs and text:On demande couturière pour recoudre les bochesVoulez vous que j’écrive a vos parents?Poudres sèches pour la guerre future 1873Sucre pastilles caramelleBaton provisoire de maréchalWe need a seamstress to mend the BocheYou want me to write to your parents?Dry powder for future war 1873Caramel sugar lozengesMarshal’s provisional batonReverse:"Artistic Caricatures" (1re Série de 6 cartes)
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.
"Lieutenant Janata owed me seven hundred crowns and had the cheek to fall at the battle of the Drina. Lieutenant Prášek was captured on the Russian front and owes me two thousand crowns. Captain Wichterle, owing me the same amount, got himself killed by his own soldiers at Ruska Rava. Lieutenant Machek, taken prisoner in Serbia, owes me fifteen hundred crowns. There are more people like that here. One falls in the Carpathians with an unpaid bill of exchange of mine; another gets taken prisoner; another gets drowned in Serbia; and a forth dies in a hospital in Hungary. Now you can understand my fears that this war will ruin me if I'm not energetic and ruthless. . . .I'm in a desperate situation. Is this war being waged to put out of the way all who owe me money?" *
"On September 23, at four in the afternoon, the regiment was assembled and massed in a square in a meadow. Our Colonel Poujal announced what we already knew, that a general offensive was going to be unleashed, that at this moment the Russians were falling back, but while most of the Germans were bogged down in Poland we would crush them on our front.'And now,' he cried in a loud voice. "Forward! No more hernias! No more weak hearts! No more ached and pains! Nothing but the will to win! Vive la France!"This patriotic nonsense didn't arouse the slightest enthusiasm. We hadn't forgotten the horrors of the last offensive in Lorette. An impressive silence greeted the colonel's final words. Only the undertaker Torrès smiled. He nodded his head as if to say, "Yes, let the herniated, the weak-hearted, the sciatics come to me. They'll get a nice reception!"" *
"The food distribution is fairer [in Bavaria than in Prussia]. Wild birds are to be had without meat cards, but not chickens or ducks. For all supplies, visitors must have cards. The hotels furnish only bread and meat tickets. I refused to go through the red tape needed to secure magistrate's cards for other edibles. The result made meals frugal. Eagerly I would scan a bill of fare. My eye would light on a pudding. Putting is a luxury. 'I'll have some,' I'd order. 'I'm sorry, Madame,' the waiter would reply, 'but the pudding contains an egg and you have no egg card.' In despair I would turn to something else. 'Give me this,' I would urge. But again would come the answer, 'I'm sorry, Madame, but that contains meal and you have no meal card.' Food is richer in Munich than in Berlin, for fodder is better and the animals fatter. But I had less to eat than in Prussia." *
"— If one were allowed to express one's views, I should write an article entitled 'The Vintage,' portraying the younger generation flung into the winepress, crushed, with the incessant gurgle of streaming blood—pale, frightened mothers looking on—while the levers of this winepress would be forced down by the unwearied arms of the ambitious politicians, the Chauvinists, the profiteers, while the idiot mob cheered them on. . . ." *
"It should be stated, however, that from the 20th to the 22d [of September, 1918], none of the orders from the Army Group, forwarded through the Fourth Army, had reached the Eighth Army and that the leader of the Eighth Army therefore did not attach to the Tiberias front the extreme importance for the general situation that the Army Group did. . . .On the early morning of September 23d, the Asia Corps effected the crossing of the Jordan without much loss. The staffs of the 16th and 19th Divisions however were captured on the west bank by British cavalry. Turkish soldiers went over to the enemy in crowds as soon as fired upon, or bombarded by British fliers. Most of them had thrown away their arms. It was another consequence of the fatal order of headquarters of the Eighth Army." *
* 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.
