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A photo postcard of a German trench view of barbed wire and a dead patrol. Dated February 22, 1916, and field postmarked the next day, the message is from a soldier to his uncle, and reads in part, 'yesterday we heard that 4 fortresses of Verdun were taken. This have been a lot of shooting . . . Maybe this is the end of Verdun and peace will come soon . . . the barbed wire on the other side of the card is French. You can see dead patrols . . .' (Translation from the German courtesy Thomas Faust.) Evidently the author safely reached the French trench line.
A squadron of the German Imperial Navy under the eye of a Zeppelin off the North Sea island and port of Helgoland.
A Liebig advertising card of the Bulgarian Army from the series Armées des États Balcaniques, published in 1910.The card shows, from left to right, a general, a soldier in summer dress, an aide-de-camp, a staff officer, a horse guard, a detachment of cavalry, and a regular infantry company.
With Bulgaria joining the Central Powers in October 1915 assuring the defeat of Serbia by the end of November, the Balkanzug — the Balkan Railway, shown in red — connected Berlin and Constantinople. By the second week of November, Turkey received ammunition and weapons from its allies.
An Italian soldier lying in the snow waving a handkerchief to a plane overhead. The logo is for Societa Italiana Aviazione, founded in 1916, which became part of Fiat Aviation in 1918.
"The steady rain brought on landslides which uncovered many French cadavers alongside our trench, which had been taken on September 25. They had been tossed out of the trench and insufficiently covered with a bit of dirt. It wasn't unusual to be grabbed, while passing, by a skeletal hand or a foot sticking out of a trench wall. We were so blasé about it that we paid it no more attention then to a root we might trip upon in our path.Finally, on November 6th, at 6 o'clock in the evening, the 281st Regiment came to relieve us, to pull us out of this hell-hole, and we went back to Agnez until the 13th." ((1), more)
"The fighting spirit of the crew has sunk so low that we would be delighted to get a torpedo in the belly. It's what we would all like to see happen to our despicable officers. If anyone had been heard wishing any such thing a year and a half ago he would have received a good thrashing. There is an evil spirit loose among us and it is only our good upbringing that stops us imitating what happened in the Russian Baltic fleet.[1] We all recognize that we have more to lose than our chains." ((2), more)
"The Serbians in Macedonia were still holding tenaciously to the Babuna and Katshanik Passes, their only remaining avenues of retreat. The Babuna Pass was defended by Col. Vassitch with a force of only 5,000 men.Here, within 10 miles of the French Army, was fought one of the most desperate battles of the Balkan War. Twenty thousand Bulgarians with heavy artillery, hurled themselves daily against the Pass during the first week in November, but were driven back at the point of the bayonet." ((3), more)
"9th November [1915]16.00 hrs. Our commander gives us sweet news. Three hundred railway wagons of ammunition have arrived, as well as 21 and 24 mm guns and 15 cm howitzers. We shall now be able to bombard the enemy for 70 hours instead of 22 and follow that with a new offensive!" ((4), more)
"The Third Battle [of the Isonzo] was suspended on the evening of 4 November, but Cadorna was unreasonably convinced that Boroević's army teetered on the edge of collapse. Knowing that 24 fresh battalions were due to arrive within a week or two, he felt sure that Gorizia could still be taken. After a week's pause, the Fourth Battle was launched with a short bombardment. The infantry did their best to charge up the open slopes of Mrzli, Podgora, Sabotino and San Michele, swept by machine-gun fire. The rain pelted down, the temperature sank, and then — on 16 November — heavy snow fell. There would not be a proper thaw until spring 1917, when corpses were revealed after a year and a half." ((5), more)
(1) Extract from the notebooks of French Corporal Louis Barthas whose unit had fought in the Third Battle of Artois, part of the great autumn Anglo-French offensive of 1915, launched on September 25, 1915.
Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914-1918 by Louis Barthas, page 134, copyright © 2014 by Yale University, publisher: Yale University Press, publication date: 2014
(2) Journal entry from November 7, 1915 by German Seaman Richart Stumpf on board SMS Helgoland sailing through the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal to the Baltic Sea. Trapped by the British blockade, and fearful of defeat by the British Royal Navy, the German Imperial Navy stayed in port through much of the war, its inactivity damaging the morale of the seamen. Our source, Peter Englund, footnotes Stumpf's entry: '[1] Stumpf's reference is to the mutiny on the Russian battleship Potemkin in 1905. His memory, however, fails him on this: the Potemkin belonged to the Russian Black Sea Fleet not the Baltic fleet.'
The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War by Peter Englund, page 177, copyright © 2009 by Peter England, publisher: Vintage Books, publication date: 2012
(3) The French troops under General Maurice Sarrail that had landed at Salonika, Greece at the beginning of October, 1915 were not able to break through Bulgarian forces barring their route to Serbia. The Serbian army's only route of retreat was westward, out of the country through Albania.
King's Complete History of the World War by W.C. King, page 190, copyright © 1922, by W.C. King, publisher: The History Associates, publication date: 1922
(4) Turkish Second Lieutenant Mehmed Fasih writing on the Gallipoli Peninsula, November 9, 1915. With the imminent defeat of Serbia, the capture of its railway, and with Bulgaria joining the Central Powers, trains can run from Berlin, Germany, through Austria-Hungary, Serbia, and Bulgaria to Turkey and its capital Constantinople. The weapons and ammunition give the Turkish forces on Gallipoli renewed hope of their ultimate defeat of the Allied invasions of April and August, and of driving the invaders into the sea.
Intimate Voices from the First World War by Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Wallis, page 136, copyright © 2003 by Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Wallis, publisher: Harper Collins Publishers, publication date: 2003
(5) Italian Commander-in-Chief Luigi Cadorna had launched the Third Battle of the Isonzo River on October 18, 1915, with artillery inadequate to the tasks of cutting barbed wire and destroying entrenched troops. Repeating the attempt to begin the Fourth Battle on November 10 with even less artillery preparation proved deadly to Cadorna's men.
The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1919 by Mark Thompson, page 132, copyright © 2008 Mark Thompson, publisher: Basic Books, publication date: 2009
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