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View across No Man's Land between Ypres and Messines in 1917 by Lance Corporal Hugh F. Ward, 97th Field Ambulance, Royal Army Medical Corps. Ward painted this while he was in the sector before, during, and after the June, 1917 Battle of Messines Ridge. Initialed 'H.W.'.
A French machine gun crew from the 227th Infantry Reserve. It was sent as a souvenir to his little sister by Georges.
Imperial Russian soldiers on parade in France.Message and postmark Marseille, April 22, 1916.
Postcard map of Trentino, Austria-Hungary, with Italy to the south and west. The Trentino had a large ethnic Italian population and was one of Italy's principal war aims. The Italian city of Asiago is on the Asiago plateau, site of the Austro-Hungarian Asiago Offensive from mid-May to mid-June, 1916. The Italians launched a failed offensive north of the city in June, 1917.
Headstones at La Nécropole Nationale de Pontavert. The cemetery contains the remains of 6,815 soldiers, 67 of them British, 54 Russian, and the remainder French. Of the total, 1,364 are entombed in the ossuary. © 2014 by John M. Shea
"Each of the eleven firing teams had its own ecstatic story of success to tell as 933,200 pounds of the strongest known explosive erupted in the heart of Messines Ridge. All nineteen mines had fired in a drawn-out tumult of sound that carried hundreds of miles. Prime Minister Lloyd George heard it at home. So did Norton Griffiths, the man who had started the whole 'big idea' (with a thumbnail sketch that had angered the Engineer in Chief, twenty-five months before). And so did a student, Ormsby-Scott, lying awake in Dublin, 500 miles from the scene.Closely after the mines, the artillery opened fire with every gun that could be used and nine divisions of infantry, their heads surely singing with the noise, advanced through billowing smoke. The Battle of Messines had begun." ((1), more)
"In the camps of some of the most famous of the army corps, mutineers seized the barracks and promised to shoot any officers who might try to arrest them.There seemed to be no limit to the revolt. Most frightening was the fact that four weeks of mutiny had succeeded in contaminating the troops manning the front lines and they had begun to threaten their officers: 'We will defend the trenches, but we won't attack.' 'We are not so stupid as to march against undestroyed machine guns.' 'We have had enough of dying on the barbed wire.'" ((2), more)
"Nor was rebellion confined to the French. As the mutinies avalanched onward, it became apparent that the two Russian brigades had become a serious menace. It was not the number of Russians in France that posed the danger—a mere fifteen or twenty thousand men were indistinguishable atoms in this war of millions—it was what they represented. For by the spring of 1917 it had been conclusively established that the Russian brigades in France were the breeding grounds of mutiny." ((3), more)
"[The offensive on the Asiago plateau] was a catastrophe: Italy's equivalent of the first day on the Somme. Low cloud cover meant that Italy's 430 guns and 220 mortars could not target the enemy wire. The general commanding the division directly below Ortigara realised the implications, and asked permission to delay the assault. This was refused by Mambretti, who was unaware that, as on the Carso, the Austrians had abandoned their trenches and excavated deep caverns for men and artillery, often three metres under the surface. The Austrian gunners on the adjacent summits had excellent sight of the Italian positions and the ground where the Sixth Army had to pass.At 15:00 hours the men of 52nd and 29th Divisions went over the top." ((4), more)
"Pétain's pronunciamento to the officer corps was followed up in a message to the commanders of armies and groups of armies dated June 11. In it he discussed the need for forthright action in suppression and held up the actions of the commander of the XXXVIIth Army Corps as being exemplary in this regard. His message concluded with a threat, 'All officers, from the commander of a platoon to the commander of a corps, must have the same sense of duty. It is necessary that all realize that they must exercise their responsibilities or else they will themselves be brought before conseils de guerre.'" ((5), more)
(1) Messines Ridge had been captured by German troops from the British during the 1914 First Battle of Ypres. It was briefly taken by the French, but lost again in December of that year. John Norton Griffiths was a Conservative Member of Parliament who started the British tunneling (and mining) units. Germans, French, and British mined on the Western Front, setting off mines beneath enemy trenches and attacking what were usually dazed survivors. The 19 mines at Messines and Wystchaete were the largest of the war, and created craters as much as 430 feet across along a front of nine miles. British, Irish, Australian, and New Zealand troops took the ridges and what remained of Messines and Wystchaete, walking unopposed across the ruins. Ten thousand German soldiers were missing and 7,354 were taken prisoner.; as many as 20,000 may have died.
War Underground by Alexander Barrie by Alexander Barrie, page 235, copyright © 1961 by Alexander Barrie, publisher: Ballantine Books, publication date: 1961
(2) After the failure of French commander in chief Robert Nivelle's 1917 spring offensive — the Second Battle of the Aisne, begun on April 16 — an offensive that Nivelle had asserted would provide the breakthrough of the German line that would lead to victory, mutinous incidents broke out in the French army, particularly among the troops that had suffered the highest rates of casualties in the offensive. The mutinies were of greater or lesser severity, beginning in April, with increasingly disruptive incidents in May, and the most violent and serious in the first weeks of June. The Russian Revolution of March provided a model for some soldiers, but few officers were harmed in France. Among the mutineers were soldiers who had survived three years of the suicidal attacks they now refused to continue.
Dare Call it Treason by Richard M. Watt, page 197, copyright © 1963 by Richard M. Watt, publisher: Simon and Schuster, publication date: 1963
(3) After the failure of French commander in chief Robert Nivelle's 1917 spring offensive — the Second Battle of the Aisne, begun on April 16 — an offensive that Nivelle had asserted would provide the breakthrough of the German line that would lead to victory, mutinous incidents broke out in the French army, particularly among the troops that had suffered the highest rates of casualties in the offensive. The mutinies were of greater or lesser severity, beginning in April, with increasingly disruptive incidents in May, and the most violent and serious in the first weeks of June. Four brigades of Russian soldiers were sent two France in the spring of 1916, two of them immediately being sent to the Salonika Front. The Russian Revolution of March provided a model for some soldiers.
Dare Call it Treason by Richard M. Watt, pp. 205–206, copyright © 1963 by Richard M. Watt, publisher: Simon and Schuster, publication date: 1963
(4) The Battle of Mount Ortigara, June 10 to 25, 1917, was fought on the Asiago Plateau, on Italy's northern border with Austria-Hungary. A year earlier, on May 14, 1916, the Austrians had launched the Asiago Offensive in the same region. Most of the land war between the two countries was fought on the Isonzo River, a rough and natural approximation of the border in Italy's northeast. The Carso Plateau was on the eastern, Austro-Hungarian side of the river. On June 10, the Tenth Battle of the Isonzo had just drawn to a close with heavy Italian losses. British forces suffered 60,000 casualties on the first day of the 1916 Battle of the Somme, nearly 20,000 of them killed. Mount Ortigara is roughly 40 kilometers east of Trento, Italy (in 1917 Austria-Hungary) and 20 km north of Asiago.
The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1919 by Mark Thompson, page 259, copyright © 2008 Mark Thompson, publisher: Basic Books, publication date: 2009
(5) French general Henri Philippe Pétain was given command of the French Army on May 15, 1917 after the failure of Commander in Chief Robert Nivelle's spring offensive, and as mutinies spread in the army, ultimately affecting nearly half the army. Pétain's carrots were assurances to soldiers that he would not squander their lives, and that France would build the weapons of war—tanks, heavy artillery, aircraft—that could bring victory. His stick was the suppression of the mutinies by force, with trials, imprisonment, and executions. Earlier in the war, French commanders had abused cours martiales, in which soldiers had no appeal beyond the army itself. These were replaced by conseils de guerre, in which the convicted retained a right of appeal to a higher court, and death sentences had to be approved by the President. Pétain insisted on retaining courts martial, with his own approval being required and final, until the mutinies were controlled. French Prime Minister Paul Painlevé reasserted his authority on July 14, when the mutinies were clearly drawing to a close.
Dare Call it Treason by Richard M. Watt, page 232, copyright © 1963 by Richard M. Watt, publisher: Simon and Schuster, publication date: 1963
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