A Swiss postcard of 'The European War' in 1914. The Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary face enemies to the east, west, and south. Germany is fighting the war it tried to avoid, battling Russia to the east and France to the west. Germany had also hoped to avoid fighting England which came to the aid of neutral (and prostrate) Belgium, and straddles the Channel. Austria-Hungary also fights on two fronts, against Russia to the east and Serbia and Montenegro to the south. Italy, the third member of the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary, declared neutrality, and looks on. Other neutral nations include Spain, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania. Japan enters from the east to battle Germany. The German Fleet stays close to port in the North and Baltic Seas while a German Zeppelin targets England. The Austro-Hungarian Fleet keeps watch in the Adriatic. Turkey is not represented, and entered the war at the end of October, 1914; Italy in late May, 1915.
Image text: Der Europäische KriegThe European WarReverse:Kriegskarte No. 61. Verlag K. Essig, BaselKunstanstalt (Art Institute) Frobenius A.G. Basel
To the Dardanelles! The Entente Allies successfully capture their objective and plant their flags in this boy's 1915 war game, as they did not in life, neither in the naval campaign, nor in the invasion of the Gallipoli peninsula.
Image text: Aux Dardanelles; Victoire; Vive les AlliésLogo and number: ACA 2131Reverse:Artige - Fabricant 16, Faub. St. Denis Paris Visé Paris N. au verso. Fabrication Française - Marque A.C.A
Allied soldiers fortifying shell craters after an advance. From The Nations at War by Willis J. Abbot, 1918 Edition.
Image text: A startling new situation confronted the Allies in their recent advance against the Germans. They are fortifying in a concealed way chains of shell craters due to intensive artillery firing of months.
We'll join in! Women beneath the flags of and in the uniforms of the Vierbund of Turkey, Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Bulgaria, are willing to play their part in the war effort.
Image text: Wir machen mit!We'll join in!Reverse:Dated Augsburg, February 3, 1916
"Brusilov was particularly successful, moving deep into the Carpathians and threatening to debouch on to the plain of Hungary. But the Russians found it difficult to coordinate their strategy, because their two Army Groups, North-West and South-West Fronts, were operating in diverging directions, their communications with STAVKA (GHQ) at Siedlce were primitive and unreliable, and their experiences and wishes divergent. When the two Army Group commanders, Ruzsky and Ivanov, met with the Grand Duke at Siedlce on 29th-30th November, this divergence in experience and aspirations became evident. Ruzsky advocated a withdrawal almost the whole way to the west bank of the Vistula, so that he could regroup, resupply, make up his units which had been seriously battered by the fighting around Lodz, and await the German attack which he considered imminent. But to do so would bare Ivanov's flank, and therefore South-West Front would have to withdraw in company with its northern neighbors. To this Ivanov was utterly opposed; his forces had brought the Austrians to a halt north of Krakow, made considerable gains south and east of it, and taken prisoners in numbers which suggested Austrian morale was low, so he advocated a further offensive." ((1), more)
"All through the day the wind gathered, till it was blowing a full gale, vicious and bitter cold; and on the 28th it reached its worst. The 28th was spoken of afterwards as 'Frozen Foot Day'; it was a day more terrible than any battle. . . . On the 29th, the limits of human strength were reached. Some of those frozen three days before were able to return to duty, but 'a great number of officers and men who had done their best to stick it out were forced to go to hospital.' The water fell during the day, but it left on average two and a half feet of thick, slushy mud, into which many trenches collapsed." ((2), more)
"During those five days the torrential rain and snow never let up. The walls of the trench were sagging; the precarious shelters which men had dug for themselves collapsed in certain places. Trenches filled with water.It's useless to try to describe the sufferings of the men, without shelter, soaked, pierced with cold, badly fed—no pen could tell their tale. You had to have lived through these hours, these days, these nights, to know how interminable they were in times like these.Proceeding in nightly work details or to and from the front lines, men slipped and fell into shell holes filled with water and weren't able to climb out; they drowned or froze to death, their hands grasping at the edges of the craters in a final effort to pull themselves out." ((3), more)
". . . however men have seen it, and may continue for a time to see it, women do count. Everybody counts in applying democracy. And there will never be a true democracy until every responsible and law-abiding adult in it, without regard to race, sex, color or creed has his or her own inalienable and unpurchasable voice in the government. That is the democratic goal toward which the world is striving today.In our own country woman suffrage is but one, if acute, phase of the problem. The Negro question is but another. The enfranchisement of the foreign-born peoples who sweep into this country and forget to leave the hyphen at home is yet another." ((4), more)
(1) On the northwest front, the Russians had escaped encirclement in the Battle of Lodz when reinforcements from north and south first bolstered the Russians, then threatened to encircle large numbers of the German troops. The Germans broke through a gap and managed their own escape. Both sides suffered heavy losses in the battle. In the southwest, the Russians had enjoyed success against the Austro-Hungarians, and threatened to cross the Carpathian Mountains to strike at the Hungarian heartland and the Hungarian capital of Budapest.
Carpathian Disaster: Death of an Army by Geoffrey Jukes, page 41, copyright © Geoffrey Jukes 1971, publisher: Ballantine, publication date: 1971
(2) The storm that struck the Dardanelles and the Gallipoli Peninsula at the end of November, 1915, began with torrential rain on the 26th, turning into a blizzard that lasted through the 28th. The temperature dropped again on November 29.
Gallipoli by John Masefield by John Masefield, pp. 171, 172, publisher: William Heinemann, publication date: 1916
(3) Excerpt from the notebooks of French Infantry Corporal Louis Barthas, writing of grim conditions he and his men faced in the Somme sector at the end of November, 1916.
Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914-1918 by Louis Barthas, page 282, copyright © 2014 by Yale University, publisher: Yale University Press, publication date: 2014
(4) Excerpt from an article 'Votes for All' by Carrie Chapman Catt, published in The Crisis, November, 1917. Catt was president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and had supported America's entry into the war. In her piece, she had already made the point that both black and white men opposed giving women the vote, and that President Woodrow Wilson's call to war had been a call in support of democracy, despite the great failures of his own nation. Catt urges women on, arguing that 'the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy.'
World War I and America by A. Scott Berg, page 431, copyright © 2017 by Literary Classics of the United States, publisher: The Library of America, publication date: 2017
