Voivoda(Marshall) Radomir Putnik, commander of the Serbian Army, defeated Austria-Hungary's three invasions of 1914. © 1919 by the New York Times Company
Image text: Gen. Radomir PutnikCommander in Chief of the Serbian Armies, who inflicted crushing defeats on Austria.
A photo postcard of a German trench view of barbed wire and a dead patrol. Dated February 22, 1916, and field postmarked the next day, the message is from a soldier to his uncle, and reads in part, 'yesterday we heard that 4 fortresses of Verdun were taken. This have been a lot of shooting . . . Maybe this is the end of Verdun and peace will come soon . . . the barbed wire on the other side of the card is French. You can see dead patrols . . .' (Translation from the German courtesy Thomas Faust.) Evidently the author safely reached the French trench line.
Image text: Reverse:France Feb 22 1916 - Dear Uncle, yesterday we have heard that 4 fortresses of Verdun were taken. This have been a lot of shooting ... Maybe this is the end of Verdun and peace will come soon ... the barbed wire on the other side of the card is French. You can see dead patrols ... (Translation from the German courtesy Thomas Faust (Ebay's Urfaust).)
Headstone of Sapper E.M. Des Brisay, 2nd Canadian Signal Company, Attd. Royal Flying Corps, died August 3, 1916, age 23, at Cabaret Rouge British Cemetery, Souchez, France. © 2013 John M. Shea
Image text: 98 SapperE.M. Des Brisay2nd Canadian Signal Coy.Attd. Royal Flying Corps, 3rd August 1916 Age 23Thou hast made him exceeding glad with Thy Countenance
Parted red curtains; in the center, in a trench, a German soldier, eyes closed, hands in overcoat pockets, leans against one side of a trench, smoking a pipe, his rifle resting on the other side of the trench. To the right, a Red soldier, red from red fur hat to red boots, holds two rifles. To the left, a Russian soldier casts away his his hat, backpack, and rifle. Across the bottom of the stage it reads, 1918. Operett: "Trockij", Operetta Trotsky. A watercolor postcard by Schima Martos.
Image text: 1918. Operett: "Trockij", Operetta Trotsky
Wooden cigarette box carved by Г. САВИНСКИ (?; G. Savinskiy), a Russian POW. The Grim Reaper strides across a field of skulls on the cover. The base includes an intricate carving of the years of war years, '1914' and, turning it 90 degrees, '1918.'
Image text: ПДМЯТЬ ВОИНЬ 1914-18To the memory of the soldiers 1914-18Reverse:19141918Г. САВИНСКИ (?)G. Savinskaya
"In November [1914] the [Austro-Hungarian] enemy launched their third and greatest invasion [of Serbia]. General Potiorek, at the head of five army corps and two supplementary divisions, resumed the attack from the northwest. The situation was again critical. The Serbian troops were in the marshy plains between the Drina and the Save. The roads on which they depended for supplies had been broken up and rendered almost impassable by three months of war. The supply of ammunition was steadily dwindling. A withdrawal of the whole line was clearly necessary, despite the depressing effect of such strategy upon the army and the civil population. It was necessary to give the Austro-Hungarians a taste of the difficulties of the country. 'All my strategy,' said Voivoda Putnik in reference to this campaign, 'consisted in placing between the enemy's fighting line and their impedimenta the Serbian national mud.'" ((1), more)
"The steady rain brought on landslides which uncovered many French cadavers alongside our trench, which had been taken on September 25. They had been tossed out of the trench and insufficiently covered with a bit of dirt. It wasn't unusual to be grabbed, while passing, by a skeletal hand or a foot sticking out of a trench wall. We were so blasé about it that we paid it no more attention then to a root we might trip upon in our path.Finally, on November 6th, at 6 o'clock in the evening, the 281st Regiment came to relieve us, to pull us out of this hell-hole, and we went back to Agnez until the 13th." ((2), more)
"Look here, Kid. Take a tip from me an[d] stop wanting to enlist. You could do nothing but go in the home guards and stay there awhile, and it would be a deuce of a awhile. You hold your horses awhile and go to school every day, and by the time you are seventeen you can get out and enlist.Don't be afraid that the war will be over by then, because if you ask me, it is going to last some time after 1920. So be a good boy and stay on the farm for a while, and go to school every day you possibly can, as that is the best thing you can ever do. I am haveing a pretty good time just now, but I don't know how long it is going to last. Most of the men here are not near as well off as I am by a long sight." ((3), more)
"October 24, a gray morning, early. I roamed about the building from one floor to another, partly for the sake of movement and partly to make sure everything was in order and to encourage those who needed it. Along the stone floors of the interminable and still half-dark corridors of the Smolny, the soldiers were dragging their machine-guns, with a hearty clangor and tramping of feet—this was the new detachment I had summoned. The few Socialist-Revolutionists and Mensheviks still at the Smolny could be seen poking sleepy, frightened faces out at us. The music of the guns was ominous in their ears, and they left the Smolny in a hurry, one after the other. We were now in full command of the building that was preparing to rear a Bolshevik head over the city and the country." ((4), more)
"But the exodus did not end with the safe transport of veterans out of northern Italy. By 6 November, about 14 trains per day left Innsbruck, 18 Villach and Klagenfurt, and 32 Laibach to return 140 000 men to their homes in the new national states of the erstwhile Empire. By mid-November, 400 000 soldiers had been trans-shipped out of the Inn Valley, 400 000 out of Carinthia, and 800 000 out of the Laibach basin. More than 460 000 Austrian troops from the Alps and the Tyrol marched home on foot.The price of Austria-Hungary's great folly had been horrendous: of the 8 million men mobilized 1 015 200 had died, 1 943 000 had been wounded, and 3 748 000 had been hospitalized due to illness. Additionally, 480 000 of the 1 691 000 men taken prisoner had perished over the course of the 52 months of fighting." ((5), more)
(1) Excerpt from an account of Austria-Hungary's third invasion of Serbia in 1914 by Robert Laffan, a British religious worker in Serbia who became a chaplain in the Serbian Army. General Potiorek commanded all three invasions, launching the third on November 6, 1914. He had also played, poorly, host to Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarejevo when he was assassinated. All the warring nations were low on ammunition. Her allies, Britain, France, and Russia, had no means to supply landlocked Serbia and had little to spare. Marshall ('Voivoda') Putnik commanded Serbia's army. Laffan published The Guardians of the Gate : Historical Lectures on the Serbs in 1917, the ultimate source of the above.
The Great Events of the Great War in Seven Volumes by Charles F. Horne, Vol. II, 1914, p. 419, copyright © 1920 by The National Alumnia, publisher: The National Alumni, publication date: 1920
(2) Extract from the notebooks of French Corporal Louis Barthas whose unit had fought in the Third Battle of Artois, part of the great autumn Anglo-French offensive of 1915, launched on September 25, 1915.
Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914-1918 by Louis Barthas, page 134, copyright © 2014 by Yale University, publisher: Yale University Press, publication date: 2014
(3) Better part of a letter from Winnie McClare to his brother Herbert, November 6, 1916. From Nova Scotia, Canada, McClare was writing from a training camp in Upper Dibgate in Kent on England's southeast coast.
Intimate Voices from the First World War by Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Wallis, pp. 226–227, copyright © 2003 by Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Wallis, publisher: Harper Collins Publishers, publication date: 2003
(4) Leon Trotsky writing of the morning of November 6, 1917 — October 24, Old Style. The Smolny, a former school for girls, had been the seat of the Soviet Executive Committee, a Committee in which Bolsheviks had been increasingly represented in the weeks before the October Revolution. Earlier in the morning, Trotsky had found the machine guns in the building poorly maintained, and had sent for the detachment he writes of. The Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky had determined to suppress the Bolsheviks on the 5th, and tried to do so on the 6th, but by the morning of the 7th the Bolsheviks would control Petrograd.
My Life: an Attempt at an Autobiography by Leon Trotsky, page 321, publisher: Dover Publications, Inc., publication date: 2007
(5) Innsbruck (on the Inn River) is north of the Trentino and Asiago front in north central Italy. Villach, Klagenfurt, and Laibach lay behind the Isonzo front in northeastern Italy, the first two cities becoming part of a new Austro-German state, the last, Laibach or Ljublana, in the newly-emerging Yugoslavia. The first declaration of war of the Great War had been that of Austria-Hungary on Serbia, political predecessor to military follies including its invasions of Serbia and Russia in 1914.
The First World War: Germany and Austria Hungary 1914-1918 by Holger H. Herwig, pp. 438–439, copyright © 1997 Holger H. Herwig, publisher: Arnold, publication date: 1997
