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
"While we stand under the menace—and perhaps on the eve—of the most powerful effort which the enemy has so far attempted against us, there exists no general plan for the operations of the Coalition in 1918."
General Maxime Weygand, the French military representative to the Allied Supreme War Council, writing to French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau on January 22, 1918. The Allies had created the Council at the Rapallo conference in November, 1917, giving it responsibility to oversee the general conduct of the war and make recommendations to the Allied governments. Since the Bolshevik Revolution that same month and the armistice and subsequent peace negotiations between Russia and the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk, the Allies had been anticipating a German offensive in the west bolstered by forces moved from the Eastern Front.
The Memoirs of Marshal Foch, translated by Col. T. Bentley Mott by Ferdinand Foch, pp. 238–239, copyright © 1931 by Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., publisher: Doubleday, Doran & Co., publication date: 1931
1918-01-22, January, 1918, Entente, Triple Entente, Rapallo, Rapallo conference
