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 19th [December, 1917]. — C— gave me details about the accident at Saint-Michel-de-Maurienne in which 439 men on leave, on their way from Italy, were burnt to death when their train was derailed. Half of them cannot be identified. It has been decided to inform their families that they died 'gloriously' in battle. Compensation for the families and the railway company. The newspapers have preserved a religious silence about the whole incident."
The accident happened on December 12, 1916, just inside France, west of Turin, Italy. The French had been supporting the Italians after their disastrous defeat in the Battle of Caporetto, but the northeastern front was holding and neither French nor British troops needed to be on the Italian front line on the Piave River. The deployment also followed the French army mutinies in which, besides their demand that they no longer be thrown pointlessly into an abattoir, French soldiers also insisted that leave policy be honored. Leave from Italy was particularly knotty because of the transport logistics. In his First World War, Martin Gilbert puts the number of dead in the disaster at 543 soldiers (page 387).
The Paris Front: an Unpublished Diary: 1914-1918 by Michel Corday, page 302, copyright © 1934, by E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publisher: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publication date: 1934
1917-12-19, 1917, December, disaster, train disaster, railroad disaster, Rapallo Conference
