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'Street Life, 1916' by Hans Larwin, a native of Vienna and painter of the war on multiple fronts, including the home front. A bread line, chiefly of women, waits along the shopfronts to buy bread. To the left, a policeman stands guard.
Russian children running from German soldiers. A pencil sketch on blank postcard field postmarked March 31, 1916.
A woman munitions worker carrying a shell apparently drops another one on the foot of a frightened man who clearly does not realize, as she does, that they are not in danger. No doubt his foot hurt.
A Russian POW leaning on a shovel or other tool. A drawing by Wilhelm Hartmann dated September 22, 1915.
I've killed many Germans, but never women or children. Original French watercolor by John on blank field postcard. In the background are indolent Russian soldiers and Vladimir Lenin, in the foreground stands what may be a Romanian soldier who is telling the Russians, 'You call me savage. I killed a lot of Boches [Germans], but never women or children!'
"— On the 22nd, the newspapers announced the forthcoming restriction of restaurant menus to no more than two dishes, and two days a week without pastries.— The 24th. The coal crisis, foretold for the 20th, has broken out. Great excitement in the Chamber. The workers in a munitions factory, now closed, have just made a demonstration in front of the Ministry of Public Works, and then marched as far as the Opéra. Hundreds of women are queuing up outside the large shops. They have been sent away after waiting for hours in the bitter cold.— A novel sight in Paris—many shops with frost on their windows, as there is no more fuel for central heating." ((1), 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." ((2), more)
"The Royal Flying Corps always leads the way in matters of invention and experiment, and I hear it is taking up the only solution of the man-power problem with energy, that is to say, the employment of women." ((3), more)
"If someone had said to me, 'One day you're going to eat soup made from dirty potatoes', or 'You're going to fight over a swede', I would have said 'What nonsense!' But nothing surprises me here — like today, I saw a soldier rummaging in a rubbish pit, picking out potato and swede peelings and eating them slowly to make them last. The hunger is dreadful: you feel it constantly, day and night. You have to forget who you once were and what you have become.Our people resent the fact that the French, Belgians and English live so well and are not forced to work. They don't go about hungry like we do. They boast that their governments send them bread and parcels from home. But we, Russians, get nothing: our punishment for fighting badly. Or, perhaps, Mother Russia has forgotten about us." ((4), more)
"The men are starting to look human again, they can cut their hair, shave, put on clean underwear and mend their clothes and clean their guns. The officers spend all day drinking and playing cards. They get their batmen to get self-distilled vodka from the rear or buy up triple-strength eau de cologne which does just as well.There is nothing to read, just some old newspapers. But Borov got hold of a whole pile of new editions. They accuse the Government of greed, indecision and secret negotiations with the Germans. We read all this in secret. Zemlianitsky says, 'It's time to finish off this war, brothers!'" ((5), more)
(1) Entries for January 23 and 24, 1917 from the diary of Michel Corday, French senior civil servant.
The Paris Front: an Unpublished Diary: 1914-1918 by Michel Corday, page 226, copyright © 1934, by E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publisher: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publication date: 1934
(2) 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
(3) Item from the Evening Standard and St James's Gazette, January 26, 1917.
The Virago Book of Women and the Great War by Joyce Marlow, Editor, page 242, copyright © Joyce Marlow 1998, publisher: Virago Press, publication date: 1999
(4) Excerpt from a diary by Russian POW Alexei Zyikov, captured in Russian Poland in 1915, and held in a POW camp in northeastern Germany. Russian POWs did not receive food parcels from the Russian government.
Intimate Voices from the First World War by Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Wallis, page 268, copyright © 2003 by Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Wallis, publisher: Harper Collins Publishers, publication date: 2003
(5) Russian soldier Dmitry Oskin writing in January, 1917. Russian Prime Minister Protopopov was . . . The Empress Alexandra, wife of Tsar Nicholas II, was believed to favor Germany, and possibly actively forwarding its interest. Oskin writes that new recruits, primarily Ukranian, continue to arrive. On being given lentils for lunch, they start a food riot.
Intimate Voices from the First World War by Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Wallis, page 289, copyright © 2003 by Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Wallis, publisher: Harper Collins Publishers, publication date: 2003
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