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A shower is so refreshing! A French couple enjoy the Hour of the Tub, the soldier perhaps home on leave.
Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, his wife Tsaritsa Alexandra, their four daughters and son, a portrait of the Russian imperial family in 'An Ambassador's Memoirs' by Maurice Paléologue, the last French Ambassador to the Russian Court.
Uncle Sam weighs the lives lost in the German sinking of the Lusitania (and other ships, as seen on the horizon) to his cash flow from selling weapons and other supplies to the combatants, particularly the allies. The moneybags have tipped the scales. A 1916 postcard by Em. Dupuis.
Copy of 'Vieux Charles,' the 1916 Spad VII of French ace Georges Guynemer, landing at Olde Rhinebeck Aereodrome, Rhinebeck, New York, September 15, 2013. © 2013 John M. Shea
'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.
"I found spirits in the village greatly changed since my last home leave. The disaster in Romania, the dispatch of numerous forces to Salonika, the imminent call-up of the conscript class of 1918, the numbers of those exempted from service who had escaped the net of the recruitment boards, the shortages of sugar, coal, and transport—all these had turned a sunny optimism into somber pessimism, as eyes began to open to how things really were." ((1), more)
"In the freezing cold of 9 January the streets of Petrograd were filled with 145,000 strikers. They were commemorating the tragedy of Bloody Sunday in 1905, when the priest Father Georgi Gapon had led 200,000 men, women and children through the snow to the Winter Palace. The people he led had wanted political rights and an end to the war with Japan. Dressed in their Sunday best they had carried aloft pictures of the Tsar but he rewarded their protest with bullets — among the 1,240 casualties 370 were killed. And now, 12 years on, the people at least knew where they stood. Their banners read 'Down with the Romanovs!' — gone were the portraits of 'the Tsar of all the Russias'. Now the red flags fluttered in the bitter breeze." ((2), more)
"'No peace can last or ought to last which does not recognize and accept the principle that governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed . . .''I am proposing government by the consent of the governed; that freedom of the seas which in international conference after conference representatives of the United States have urged . . . and that moderation of armaments which makes of armies and navies a power for order merely . . . These are American principles, American policies . . . They are the principles of mankind and must prevail.'" ((3), more)
"January 23rd.—Lateral telephoning has been cut out: there are festoons of wire in the trenches. In the morning two French planes attacked three Germans: by their speed and manœuvre they shot down one in flames and one crippled in a few minutes; the third escaped. Great flying by the Frenchmen. After dark we took over the front of Clery Left.January 24rd.—What a night! I have not been so cold, or for so long, since bivouacking on the Basuto Border. We are on the top of a bare 1200-foot down among downs. Mont St. Quentin, a truncated sugar-loaf peak is half right; beyond it the steeples of Péronne (seen from our right) are features of a wonderful panorama. . . . But the delight of it doesn't warm chilled bones." ((4), more)
"— 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." ((5), more)
(1) Excerpt from the notebooks of French Infantry Corporal Louis Barthas, who came home to his village in Languedoc in southern France on January 21, 1917. The Allies had opened the Salonica Front in 1915 in a failed attempt to aid Serbia. By early 1916 there were over 500,000 Allied soldiers on the front. Romania entered the war on the side of the Allies in August, 1916, and were quickly defeated, the capital of Bucharest falling on December 6. The remains of the Serbian army was in the Allied line in the Balkans. What was left of Romania's army was in Moldavia, in the country's northeast, holding the front with the Russians. German troops held much of France's coal fields in northern France. The coal shortage was made worse due to rationing, a very cold winter, and its diversion to military uses. The shortage of coal and military demands of course affected transport.
Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914-1918 by Louis Barthas, page 291, copyright © 2014 by Yale University, publisher: Yale University Press, publication date: 2014
(2) The bitterly cold winter of 1916–17 strained all the combatant nations, perhaps none more so than Russia. The cold and a coal shortage prevented transport of adequate food supplies to the cities including the Russian capital of Petrograd. Russian Tsar Nicholas II was Nicholas Romanoff, autocrat and Tsar of all Russias. He hoped to pass the autocracy on to his son intact.
1917: Russia's Year of Revolution by Roy Bainton, page 50, copyright © Roy Bainton 2005, publisher: Carroll and Graf Publishers, publication date: 2005
(3) Excerpts from the address of United States President Woodrow Wilson to the United States Senate, January 22, 1917, as quoted in John Dos Passos's Mr. Wilson's War. Wilson called for 'peace without victory.'
Mr. Wilson's War by John Dos Passos, page 196, copyright © 1962, 2013 by John Dos Passos, publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
(4) Extract from the entry for January 8, 1917 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, and fellow soldiers who served with him. The Battalion was then serving in the Somme sector. The planes flown by the French pilots may have been Nieuports or the newer Spad VII, introduced in September, 1916. The winter of 1916–1917 — Germany's 'Turnip Winter' — was bitterly cold. Dunn had served in South Africa in the Boer War where he bivouacked 'on the Basuto Border.'
The War the Infantry Knew 1914-1919 by Captain J.C. Dunn, page 292, copyright © The Royal Welch Fusiliers 1987, publisher: Abacus (Little, Brown and Company, UK), publication date: 1994
(5) 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
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