Map of the Artois region north of the city of Arras, France, from The Illustrated War News, Part 41, May 19, 1915. The French launched the Second Battle of Artois on May 9, 1915 to try to capture the heights of Notre Dame de Lorette and Vimy.
Image text: Where the French are making important progress: the Carency district, the scene of the victorious battle and the line of the Loos-Arras advance.
Entrenched German soldiers behind sniper plates at Slota Gora, September 26, 1916. Slota (or Zlota) Gora was in Polish Russia, west of a line running from Warsaw to Cracow. An original watercolor (over pencil) by O. Oettel, 12th company of Landwehr, IR 32 in the field. A sketch in pencil and red crayon is on the reverse.
Image text: Slota Gora26.9.16O.Oettel 12L.32.I. FeldeZlota GoraSeptember 26, 1916O. Oettel, 12th Landwehr 32nd RegimentIn the Field
Russian children running from German soldiers. A pencil sketch on blank postcard field postmarked March 31, 1916.
Image text: Reverse:Message postmarked March 31, 1916
Nautical chart of the Kiel Fjord on the Baltic Sea, leading to Kiel, one of the home ports of the German Baltic Fleet. Just north of Kiel is the entrance to the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal, which crosses the Jutland Peninsula in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, and carries traffic to the mouth of the River Elbe on the North Sea.
Image text: Seekarte der Kieler FöhrdeNautical chart of the Kiel FjordLabeled: Holstein, Kiel itself, and the towns of Laboe and Friedrichsort (and its lighthouse) at the mouth of the fjord.Someone has annotated the town of Lutterbek.
"Early on the 25th January [1915] a deserter brought notice of an enemy attack on a larger scale against Cuinchy, now held by the 1st Brigade, and the French on its right; and against Givenchy, held by the 3rd Brigade. An attack did take place an hour and a half later, units of the German 84th Brigade (XIV. Corps) advancing south, and units of the 79th Brigade (VII. Corps)) north of the canal." ((1), more)
"January 25th.—Dolling, always watchful of the doings of enemy working-parties, had reported some new stakes. Expecting that wirers would be at work on them he and five bravoes stole across after dark. A party was seen and bombed—very successfully, judging by the cries of woe. Our guns co-operated, all but knocking our fellows' heads off. Stanway was giving occasional but deadly aid to the snipers. Once he snapped an officer where the German parapet was low. Another day he got a pheasant for the pot. He had a disconcerting habit at one time of keeping his revolver on the table when playing cards, to shoot rats as they ran along the cornice beam of the dug-out." ((2), more)
"In January, 1917, temperatures went down to more than forty degrees below zero, and the railway network upon which the cities utterly depended for their food and the army for its supplies were frozen to a standstill. The desire for food, warmth, and peace dominated the mind of the ordinary man, and you had only to join a bread queue to realize that the Russian worker, for all his docility, his famous capacity for enduring terrible hardships, was approaching one of his periodic outbursts of semimadness, when he could think of nothing but to smash and burn and destroy. This—not the Germans—was the danger which the 'official' classes really feared and tried desperately to impress upon the Czar." ((3), more)
"On 25 January [1918] the workers of the Torpedo Yard in Kiel walked off their jobs to protest the Navy's decision to send several of their 'foremen' to the front as punishment for public demonstrations for food. Within 72 hours, the number of strikers had reached 24 000. By 28 January they were joined by tens of thousands of workers in Berlin; 2 days later the police estimated the number at 185 000 from 299 factories. Daily food consumption had fallen from 3000 calories in peacetime to just 1400 by 1918." ((4), more)
(1) Excerpt from a history of British Military Operations in France and Belgium, 1915. The previous paragraph notes that, 'the front was never at rest ; but the principal combats took place in two areas,' one of them being in front of Cuinchy on the La Bassée Canal. Cuinchy is immediately south of the Canal, Givenchy immediately north.
Military Operations France and Belgium, 1915, Vol. I, Winter 1914-15: Battle of Neuve Chappelle : Battle of Ypres [Second] by J. E. Edmonds, pp. 29, 30, copyright © asserted, publisher: Macmillan and Co., Limited, publication date: 1927
(2) Excerpt from the entry for January 25, 1916 from the writings — diaries, letters, and memoirs — of Captain J.C. Dunn, Medical Officer of the Second Battalion His Majesty's Twenty-Third Foot, The Royal Welch Fusiliers. Soldier Dolling had seen the stakes that would support newly-placed barbed wire, and rightly reasoned German soldiers would string new wire at night.
The War the Infantry Knew 1914-1919 by Captain J.C. Dunn, page 178, copyright © The Royal Welch Fusiliers 1987, publisher: Abacus (Little, Brown and Company, UK), publication date: 1994
(3) The bitterly cold winter, the demands of the war, the coal shortage, transport failures, all were speeding the crisis around Russian Nicholas II to a head. If not indifferent, if not oblivious, he failed to act to protect those over whom he ruled, the army he commanded, the family he headed, and himself.
The Russian Revolution by Alan Moorehead, page 132, copyright © 1958 by Time, Inc., publisher: Carroll and Graf, publication date: 1989
(4) Workers in Austria-Hungary and then Germany went on strike in January, 1918 as hunger and war-weariness bit. Hopes for an end to the war that arose from the December, 1917 armistice between Russia and the Central Powers were dashed on January 12 when German military representative General Max Hoffman made it clear Germany would not evacuate occupied territory on the Eastern Front. Anticipating revolutionary activity across war-weary Europe, Russian representative Leon Trotsky played for time. Kiel, the German Empire's major port on the Baltic Sea, was connected to the North Sea by the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal.
The First World War: Germany and Austria Hungary 1914-1918 by Holger H. Herwig, pp. 378–379, copyright © 1997 Holger H. Herwig, publisher: Arnold, publication date: 1997
