His reach exceeds his grasp. A German fox eyes grapes — the cities of Calais, Paris, Verdun, and Petrograd — he hadn't conquered, and wouldn't in the war. The twining vines labeled Belgium, Italy, England, Russia, France, Japan, Serbia, Portugal, Montenegro, and Romania, the last of which joined the Allies in October 1916. In the distance is a rolling battlefield of smoking cannon and barbed wire. A postcard by F. Sancha.

Grapes: Calais, Paris, Verdun, Petrograd



Vines: Belgium, Italy, England, Russia, France, Japan, Serbia, Portugal, Montenegro, and Romania



Signed: F. Sancha

Other views: Larger, Back

Friday, March 29, 1918

"The Secretary of State has received from Ambassador Sharp in Paris a graphic report of his visit to the scene of the horrible tragedy which occurred on the afternoon of Good Friday in a church by the explosion of a German shell projected from far back of the enemy lines a distance of more than seventy miles. The appalling destruction wrought by this shell is, as the Ambassador remarked, probably not equaled by any single discharge of any hostile gun in the cruelty and horrors of its result.

In no other one spot in Paris, even where poverty had gathered on that holy day to worship, could destruction of life have been so great. Nearly a hundred mangled corpses lying in the morgues, with almost as many seriously wounded, attested to the measure of the toll exacted. Far up to the high, vaulted arches, between the flying buttresses well to the front of the church is a great gap in the wall, from which fell upon the heads of the devoted worshipers many tons of solid masonry. It was this that caused such a great loss of life."

Quotation Context

Beginning of the April 3, 1918 report of William Sharp, United State Ambassador to France, to the Secretary of State concerning the March 29, 1918 German bombardment of Paris. The German advance in Operation Michael put Paris within the range of a new German gun. Among the 91 killed at the Church of St. Gervais were the Secretary of the Swiss Legation and Rose-Marie Ormond, niece and muse of American painter John Singer Sargent. Sixty-eight more were wounded. In a letter of October 20, 1914, Henry James wrote to Edith Wharton of the death of Ormond's husband Robert André-Michel, a French art historian and author of Avignon: the Frescoes of the Palace of the Popes: 'Mrs. C., who had been lunching with Emily Sargent, further brought me in the dismal news of the death of the so distinguished little French husband of her niece, Violet Ormond's daughter, the Rose-Marie whom Sargent so exquisitely painted a year ago; the said André Michel having been killed in one of these last engagements.' (Henry James Letters, Vol. IV: 1895–1916, pp. 722–723.)

Source

The Great Events of the Great War in Seven Volumes by Charles F. Horne, Vol. VI, 1918, p. 93, copyright © 1920 by The National Alumnia, publisher: The National Alumni, publication date: 1920

Tags

1918-03-29, 1918, March, Paris, Sancha fox, St. Gervais