Pope Benedict XV, holding a basket of olive leaves, uses a megaphone to address troops fighting — shooting, bayoneting, using rifles as clubs — in uniforms of France, Germany, Turkey, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Australia.Title at the top:A Päpa Bëkeszözata 1917The Pope's Words of Peace, 1917At the bottom:XV Benedek Vigëcz:Pardon Uraim! Szëp Müpätmät tesseneh. . . The Pope issued his message on August 1, 1917.Watercolor postcard by Schima Martos.
Title at the top:A Päpa Bëkeszözata 1917The Pope's Words of Peace, 1917.At the bottom:XV Benedek Vigëcz:Pardon Uraim! Szëp Müpätmät tesseneh. . .
"For one blinding moment the evil sorcery, the taboo, about discussing peace was broken. August 16 [1917] Pope Benedict XV sent from the Vatican a note to all belligerent governments crying out against the war: 'Shall, then, the civilized world be naught but a field of death? And shall Europe, so glorious and flourishing, rush, as though driven by universal madness, toward the abyss, and lend her hand to her own suicide?' He suggested broad means of ending the conflict and settling the issues. The Times denounced the note as 'pro-German and anti-Ally . . . permeated with German ideas.' Every major power on both sides rejected it. The fighting would go on until somebody won. At Birkenhead Lloyd George estimate in an impromptu speech that 'we shall just win,' to which the Nation, that irreverent organ of the Left, innocently asked, 'Win What?'"
In August 1917 the war had been going on for three years for most combatants, and calls for peace came from numerous sources. Germany had floated a peace proposal in December 1916. President Woodrow Wilson had done the same at the same time. The Russian Revolution in March 1917 and the French army mutinies in the spring and summer had both been in part driven by demands for peace. Desertion rates were up in France and Italy and endemic in Russia where thousands of soldiers simply left the front.
In Flanders Fields, the 1917 Campaign by Leon Wolff, page 160, copyright © 1958 by Leon Wolff, publisher: The Viking Press, publication date: 1958
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