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A folding postcard from a pencil sketch of an unsuccessful Allied gas attack in Flanders.
Frontispiece picture of the author from '1914 & other Poems' by Rupert Brooke. The profile is from a 1913 photograph by Sherril Schell.
Photograph of a village on Lake Van, an area of Turkey populated largely by ethnic Armenians. The area was one of the first targeted on a large scale when Turkey turned on its Armenian citizens. Photo from Ambassador Morgenthau's Story by Henry Morgenthau, American Ambassador to Turkey from 1913 to 1916.
To the Dardanelles! The Entente Allies successfully capture their objective and plant their flags in this boy's 1915 war game, as they did not in life, neither in the naval campaign, nor in the invasion of the Gallipoli peninsula.
A hold-to-light postcard of the German and Austro-Hungarian victory (shortlived) over the Russians in the Uzroker Pass in the Carpathians on January 28, 1915. Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, Chief of the Austro-Hungarian General Staff, launched an offensive with three armies on January 23, including the new Austro-Hungarian Seventh Army under General Karl von Pflanzer-Baltin.
"It was a heavy, low cloud, as far as the eye could see; they described it variously as 'greyish-yellow' or 'greenish-yellow,' and also as 'two clouds . . . which appeared to merge into each other.' As the thing roiled toward them, the Canadians were baffled. . . . It was not long before the cloud reached the French lines to the north, which were joined to the Canadians' immediate left. As the dense cloud enveloped the French, nothing could be seen of them. Suddenly the Canadians heard the French fire begin to slacken, then stop altogether. Not long afterward, the French artillery also ceased to fire. Those Canadians nearest the French began to experience burning in their eyes, and coughing, and then the inability to breath; in effect strangling.Men in the reserve trenches in the rear were shocked to see thousands of the Algerian and African troops streaming past, eyes rolled up white, stumbling, staggering, falling, clutching their throats. Those few who could speak at all were gasping, 'gaz! gaz! gaz!' . . . As a Canadian artilleryman, Major Andrew McNaughton, described it: 'They literally were coughing their lungs out; glue was coming out of their mouths. It was a very disturbing, very disturbing sight.'" ((1), more)
"If I should die, think only this of me : That there's some corner of a foreign fieldThat is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed ;A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,A body of England's, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given ;Her sights and sounds ; dreams happy as her day ; And laughter, learnt of friends ; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven." ((2), more)
"From the deep silence of the night until morning, every few hours Armenians were brought to the prison. And so behind these high walls, the jostling and commotion increased as the crowd of prisoners became denser. It was as if all the prominent Armenian public figures — assemblymen, representatives, revolutionaries, editors, teachers, doctors, pharmacists, dentists, merchants, bankers, and others in the capital city — had made an appointment to meet in these dim prison cells. Some even appeared in their nightclothes and slippers. The more those familiar faces kept appearing, the more the chatter abated and our anxiety grew." ((3), more)
"Our first sight of it was from the sea on the day of the landing. It looked wild country. Like some part of New Zealand really. We didn't land until three in the afternoon. Ashore, it was frightful. Terrible. I've never seen anything like that before. We followed the fighting, until we were halfway up Walker's Ridge. I saw men with all kinds of wounds. Arms off. Legs off. All we could do was bandage them up as best we could and get them back to the beach. That was our main job, getting casualties back to the beach. It was a problem sorting out the living from the dead. We looked at each man fairly closely. When they could walk there wasn't any trouble. Stretcher-bearers took away the severely wounded. All we could do was bandage them up and give morphia pills to ease their suffering. Some died on the way back to the beach. They had to sort things out back there." ((4), more)
"Storm and rain had uncovered the torn shreds of Austrian uniforms lying on the edge of shell craters.Behind Nová Čabyna entangled in the branches of an old burnt-out pine there was hanging the boot of an Austrian infantryman with a piece of shin-bone.Where the artillery fire had raged one could see forests without leaves or cones, trees without crowns and shot-up farmsteads.The train went slowly over the freshly-built embankments so that the whole battalion could take in and thoroughly savour the delights of war. At the sight of the army cemeteries with their white crosses gleaming on the plains and on the slopes of the devastated hills all could prepare themselves slowly but surely for the field of glory which ended with a mud-bespattered Austrian cap fluttering on a white cross." ((5), more)
(1) Description of the war's first effective gas attack that launched the Second Battle of Ypres on April 22, 1915. The Germans had released chlorine gas from cylinders, having delayed their offensive for several days due to wind conditions. The Germans struck along a line held by French Colonial troops with the Canadians on their right. The Germans had first used poison gas in January in the Battle of Bolimow against the Russians, but the cold weather limited in its effectiveness. The Russians did not report its use to their Allies.
A Storm in Flanders: The Ypres Salient, 1914-1918: Tragedy and Triumph on the Western Front by Winston Groom, page 99
(2) 'V. The Soldier' from the sonnet sequence '1914' by the English poet Rupert Brooke. He died in a French Hospital on the island of Skyros in the Aegean Sea on April 23, 1915, after a case of sunstroke had developed into blood poisoning. Brooke had been set to sail a few hours later as part of the Gallipoli invasion force. His first book, Poems, from 1911, was reprinted twice in May 1915. By August 1915, his second book, 1914 and other Poems, was in its seventh printing. A Sub-Lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Brooke had participated in the October 1914 Antwerp Expedition before joining the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force.
1914 & other Poems by Rupert Brooke, page 15, copyright © 1915 by Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd., publisher: Sidgwick & Jackson, Limited, publication date: 1915
(3) Excerpt from the memoir of Grigoris Balakian, a priest of the Armenian Church, and one of the Armenian intellectuals of Constantinople imprisoned on the night of April 24, 1915, and moved by buses to a waiting ferry to cross the Sea of Marmora to be moved to Ayash and Chankiri. A postwar study identified 761 men and women who were rounded up in Constantinople on April 24. Most died or were killed.
Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918 by Grigoris Balakian, page 57, copyright © Introduction and Translation 2009 by Peter Balakian, publisher: Vintage Books, publication date: 2009-00-00
(4) Excerpt from George Skerret's account of the landing of the New Zealand Otago Battalion on Gallipoli on April 25, 1915, the first day of the Gallipoli campaign. Skerret was a member of the medical corps. The Australians landed in the morning, followed by the New Zealanders later in the day. The beach became known as Anzac Cove after the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps.
Voices of Gallipoli by Maurice Shadbolt, pp. 50, 51, copyright © 1988 Maurice Shadbolt, publisher: Hodder and Stoughton, publication date: 1988
(5) Excerpt from Jaroslav Hašek's novel The Good Soldier Švejk. Švejk (or Schweik) was a foot soldier in an Austro-Hungarian Czech battalion on its way to the front lines on the Russian Front. Nová Čabyna is on the southwestern side of the Carpathian Mountains which the Russians had been trying to battle through since the beginning of the year, but with inadequate munitions to do so. By April, 1915, when Švejk was approaching the front, Austria-Hungary had suffered nearly 800,000 casualties in the mountains since the beginning of the year.
The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek, page 592, copyright © Cecil Parrott, 1973 (translation), publisher: Penguin
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