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Registration Certificate — draft card — for John Edward Barlow of Columbus, Ohio. Both houses of Congress passed the Selective Service bill on May 16, 1917, and President Wilson signed it into law two days later. All men then eligible — that is, between the ages of 21 and 30, both inclusive — were required to register on June 5, 1917, as Barlow and ten million others did.
The fruits of military leave: a French woman wearing the kepi of 1914-15 hold an infant twins, a boy and a girl, one in each arm.
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.
"[Secretary of War Newton D.] Baker and other military and civilian authorities had initially feared widespread resistance to the draft. . . .The actual response of the American people on June 5, a Tuesday, exceeded the most optimistic hopes of Baker and his military advisers. Amid hastily organized local festivities, parades, pageants and processions, some ten million men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty came forward to register before more than 135,000 local board officials. From across the land, reports of enthusiastic and patriotic compliance flooded in. Ocala, Florida was typical. Civic officials organized a parade of almost one thousand citizens. To the strains of 'The Star Spangled Banner' and 'Dixie,' members of fraternal orders, women's clubs, and service organizations marched down Fort King Avenue, the black contingents following the whites." ((1), more)
"The causes of mutinies appear to be:1. Too protracted periods in the front line without relief, after the great offensive—for want (in many cases) of reserves to replace them.2. Leave periods delayed for over four months, contrary to all regulations.3. The moral effect of the set-back of the 16th April, and the troops' determination not to make further attacks.4. Disappointment at the rejection of the peace offers of the 12th December, 1916.5. The veto on passports for Stockholm.6. The general war-weariness." ((2), more)
"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." ((3), 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.'" ((4), 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." ((5), more)
(1) The Selective Service Act was passed by both houses of the United States Congress on May 16, 1917 and signed into law by Woodrow Wilson on the 18th. Registration was required between the hours of 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. on June 5th for all those then subject to registration. In his April 2, 1917 address to the joint session of Congress requesting a declaration of war on Germany, the President had stated that 500,000 men should be immediately added to the military with 'subsequent additional increments of equal force' depending on need and the resources to train the men. The United States army was segregated, and would remain so until 1948.
America's Great War: World War I and the American Experience by Robert H. Zieger, page 60, copyright © 2000 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., publication date: 2001
(2) Excerpt from the entry for June 6, 1917 from the diary of Michel Corday, French senior civil servant, writing about the causes of the French army mutinies that followed the failure of the French offensive begun on April 16, the Second Battle of the Aisne. Germany had made peace overtures in December, 1916, and Socialists would hold a conference in Stockholm in neutral Sweden.
The Paris Front: an Unpublished Diary: 1914-1918 by Michel Corday, pp. 257–258, copyright © 1934, by E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publisher: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publication date: 1934
(3) 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
(4) 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
(5) 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
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