Search by or
Search: Quotation Context Tags
Western Front: Aisne & Oise. French folding postcard map of the Aisne and Oise, number 3 from the series Les Cartes du Front. The map includes the Champagne front from Compiègne in the west to Chalons-sur-Marne in the east including Soissons, Chemin des Dammes, Laon, Reims, and Château Thierry.
Chosen Boy, a 1918 watercolor by Paul Klee. From Paul Klee: Early and Late Years: 1894-1940. © 2013 Moeller Fine Art
Zeppelin Kommt! Children play a Zeppelin raid on London. Holding his bomb in the gondola is a doll of the airship's inventor, Count Zeppelin. The other children, playing the English, cower, and the British fleet — folded paper boats — remains in port. Prewar postcards celebrated the imposing airships and the excitement they generated with the same expression, 'Zeppelin Kommt!'. Postcard by P.O. Engelhard (P.O.E.). The message on the reverse is dated May 28, 1915.
Photograph of the Russian monk Grigory Rasputin from The War of the Nations Portfolio in Rotogravure Etchings Compiled from the Mid-Week Pictorial. Tsar Nicholas of Russia and his wife were introduced to Rasputin in 1907. According to Maurice Paléologue, French Ambassador to Russia, Rasputin, 'wheedled them, dazzled them, dominated them.'
General Karl Freiherr von Pflanzer-Baltin in the snowy field.
"Just as the course of the war hitherto had given every soldier new conceptions of human powers of endurance, so it had established totally new standards for the requirements of matériel and its efficiency. Only those who held responsible posts in the German G.H.Q. in the winter of 1914-15, during which almost every single shot had to be counted in the Western Army, and the failure of one single ammunition train, the breaking of a rail or any other stupid accident, threatened to render whole sections of the front defenceless, can form any estimate of the difficulties that had to be overcome at that time." ((1), more)
"The fighting in and about Sarikamish lasted in all nearly a fortnight, but the various and varying accounts of its later phases convey a somewhat blurred impression rather than provide a consecutive narrative. That impression is mainly of great masses of Turks, brave to the last but famished and half-frozen, being mown down by guns and maxims and rifle-fire on the main road, in the passes, and on the lower slopes of the mountains; or of their fierce attacks repulsed and Russian counter-attacks driven home, the cold steel finishing what was left undone by shell and bullet — the whole against a background of snow, in an atmosphere so arctic that the wounded succumbed to the cold where they fell." ((2), more)
"The first raid by Zeppelins in which bombs were dropped on British soil occurred on the night of January 19-20, 1915, when two airships bombed Sheringham, Snettisham, King's Lynn, and Yarmouth. Four people were killed and sixteen injured, and during the next six months only six small raids were recorded. These did little damage. Then in the summer of that year three raids were made on London, and considerable damage was inflicted." ((3), more)
"Yesterday Rasputin was run over on the Nevsky Prospekt by a troika going at full speed. He was picked up with a slight wound on the head.After the incident to Madame Vyrubova five days ago, this fresh warning from Heaven is only too eloquent! The war is displeasing God more than ever!" ((4), more)
"'The most puzzling thing about this war,' a Russian officer wrote to his mother on January 21 [1915], 'is that we don't come to hate the enemy . . . I think it's because we're united by a common bond; we've all been forced to do the thing most alien to human nature: kill our fellow man." ((5), more)
(1) No army had been prepared for the enormous quantities of munitions that were expended in the opening months. By early 1915 all nations were under-supplied, and did not have the weapons to mount major offensives. The shell shortage was particularly acute in Russia, which purchased weapons from Japan and the United States, and Britain, were the issue precipitated a political crisis.
General Headquarters and its Critical Decisions, 1914-1916 by Erich von Falkenhayn, pp. 47, 48, copyright © 1920 by Dodd, Mead and Company, Inc., publisher: Dodd, Mead and Company, Inc., publication date: 1920
(2) A grim summary by Robert Machray of the Turkish offensive that ended in disaster in the mountains, snow, and bitter weather of the Caucasus in the Battle of Sarikamish. The incompetent War Minister Enver Pasha aimed to seize the frontier rail terminus at Sarikamish before advancing on Russia's fortress at Kars. He instead destroyed a Turkish Army, and left as many as 70,000 of him men dead.
The Great Events of the Great War in Seven Volumes by Charles F. Horne, Vol. III, 1915, pp. 46, 47, copyright © 1920 by The National Alumnia, publisher: The National Alumni, publication date: 1920
(3) Zeppelins had been used in the sieges of the Belgian fortresses of Liège in August 1914 and Antwerp in October, and against French cities near the Franco-German border. To forestall an attack on Britain, the British had struck the Zeppelin sheds at Cuxhaven on December 25, 1914, causing little damage.
The Zeppelin Fighters by Arch Whitehouse, page 67, copyright © 1966 by Arch Whitehouse, publisher: New English Library, publication date: 1978
(4) Entry from the memoirs of Maurice Paléologue, French Ambassador to Russia, for Wednesday, January 20, 1915.Tsar Nicholas and his German-born wife Tsaritsa Alexandra were introduced to the monk Rasputin in 1907, and Paléologue earlier (September 28, 1914) reported that 'Rasputin obtained an extraordinary ascendancy over the Tsar and Tsaritsa,' in part because the empress believed the monk could heal her son of the hemophilia he shared with many on his mother's side. Anna Viroubova, lady-in-waiting, friend, and confidant to Alexandra, spent many evenings alone with the royal family, which isolated itself. Viroubova was seriously injured in a railway accident on January 2, 1915. Many in Petrograd blamed her, Rasputin, and the Tsaritsa for the Tsar's isolation. Viroubova was imprisoned during the first Russian Revolution in 1917.
An Ambassador's Memoirs Vol. I by Maurice Paléologue, page 260, publisher: George H. Doran Company, publication date: 1925
(5)
A Mad Catastrophe by Geoffrey Wawro, page 351, copyright © 2014 by Geoffrey Wawro, publisher: Basic Books
1 2 Next
