A crazed Great Britain urges a broken Russia, a nose-picking, dozing Italy, and a sullen France to continued offensives in a German postcard imagining the November 6, 1917 Entente Ally Conference of Rapallo after the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo. The Battle, also known as the Battle of Caporetto, was a disastrous defeat for Italy and the first Austro-Hungarian offensive on the Isonzo Front. The Austrians had significant German support.
Entente Konferenz der XII. IsonzoschlachtEntente Conference of the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo
". . . the 112th Heavy Artillery found itself in late November en route to the Piave valley (where the Italian retreat had halted a month earlier). Still headquartered in the Champagne, where the regiment had enjoyed a few months of respite after the bitterly contested battles of the summer, the 112th received its marching orders on 12 November and left five days later. The journey was slow—Paul did not arrive in Italy until the first of December—and fraught with logistical difficulties."
Martha Hanna's Your Death Would Be Mine is based on the correspondence between Paul Pireaud and his wife Marie. In the summer of 1917, Paul served with the 112th Heavy Artillery Regiment in the Moronvilliers sector northeast of Reims in Champagne. French and British units were sent to support the Italians after the disaster of Caporetto. The Italian retreat finally stopped on the Piave River.
Your Death Would Be Mine; Paul and Marie Pireaud in the Great War by Martha Hanna, page 232, copyright © 2006 by Martha Hanna, publisher: Harvard University Press, publication date: 2006
1917-11-17, 1916, November, Italy, Caporetto, Twelfth Isonzo Conference
