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The conditions British Troops faced in Flanders and Passchendaele.
Neutral Netherlands commiserates with its invaded, war-battered neighbor Belgium. One of a series of 1916 postcards on neutral nations by Em. Dupuis.
A French soldier wearing the uniform of 1914/1915 stands by the side of a water-filled shell crater.
Map of the North and Baltic Seas (labeledNord-See and Ostsee) from a folding postcard of five battlefronts: the Western and Eastern Fronts; North and Baltic Seas, Mediterranean and Black Seas; and the Serbian-Montenegro Front.
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.
"That evening Gough phoned Plumer and asked him to postpone the attack. Sir Herbert declined. It took place at dawn along a six-mile front and gained an average of four hundred yards. For lack of a better name it was called 'The First Battle of Passchendaele,' though in that direction the crater front was pushed forward only a hundred yards. The New Zealanders were badly mauled. The 2nd Brigade, especially, had been trapped astride the Gravenstafel road as they pressed on to the entanglements under a torrent of small arms and machine-gun fire. This wire was totally unbreached except for a single land along the sunken road. Through it the men poured . . .. . . After the war an official historian coldly asked whether 'any of the higher commanders [were] aware that in these operations the infantry attacked virtually without protection.' The episode had, in fact, almost crossed the line which divides war from murder. Thirteen thousand men were lost in a few hours . . ." ((1), more)
"— The 13th. At Gheusi's. It was to-day they shot the lovely Mata-Hari. General Vialon, who came to see Gheusi during the interval, brought the news. Germany offered to liberate from ten to twenty French officers, prisoners of war, if they would spare this woman. Her counsel, Clunet, an old man touched by her beauty, pleaded her case movingly, invoking the memory of his own son killed at the front. Some officials, said to have been her lovers, also made appeals on her behalf." ((2), more)
"One man left the front line wounded slightly at dusk on the 12th and on the morning of the 13th was discovered stuck fast in a shell hole a few yards from where he started. Repeated efforts were made to get him out with spades, ropes etc. At one time 16 men were working at once under enemy view. But he had to be left there when the Battalion was relieved on the night 13th/14th." ((3), more)
"During the night of 14–15 October [1917], the Pripyat assisted by three motorboats laid a field of mines in Kassar Wick north of Cape Pawasterort. According to one account, the Pripyat's mutinous crew had been replaced by more reliable men drawn from the destroyers and torpedo boats. When the German flotillas returned to the inlet the next day, the destroyer B.98 had her bow blown off and had to be towed back to Libau. The destroyer B.112, in seeking a path around the new minefield, grounded and was put out of action. Nevertheless, the heavy fighting in the waters around the north of Ösel was really over." ((4), more)
"Of those comrades who departed for the West hardly one has stayed alive. There were a few great characters among them who I would gladly have met up with again. I can still picture them at the station, waving from the departing train. 'Pity that you can't come with us!' shouted Erichson, the Mecklenburger who with Wurche and me had formed the third leaf of the clover in the command of the 9th company at Augustovo. Now he lies buried before Verdun. Had he guessed that we would shortly be part of the assaults on Tarnopol and Riga, he would probably have stayed with us. . . . I am once more thankful for my balanced faith, which has never been seriously shaken. Do not suppose that I believe myself to be preserved and protected to the prejudice of others — but I have the tranquil, inner knowledge that everything that happens and can happen to me is part of a living development over which nothing dead has any power." ((5), more)
(1) British General Hubert Gough had commanded the opening attacks in the first three weeks of the Third Battle of Ypres, but Commander Douglas Haig, disappointed in Gough's results, transferred responsibility to General Herbert Plumer. Plumer was initially successful with actions in which the artillery were adequate to support the infantry, but became less so with each action, as he curtailed the time between attacks, leaving the artillery unable to move into position for adequate preliminary bombardments. He ignored the rain, the murderous mud it created on the battlefield, and Gough's advice, and went ahead on October 12 with the First Battle of Passchendaele.
In Flanders Fields, the 1917 Campaign by Leon Wolff, pp. 237 and 238, copyright © 1958 by Leon Wolff, publisher: The Viking Press, publication date: 1958
(2) Beginning of the entry for October 13, 1917 from the diary of Michel Corday, French senior civil servant. Mata Hari, a self-made performer and dancer who had been derided for not knowing how to dance, was originally Margaretha Zelle from the Netherlands, and moved to Indonesia with her husband. She left him, moved to Paris, and achieved some success as a performer. At the time of her arrest as a German spy, her career had been in decline for some time. Gheusi was presumably Pierre-Barthélemy Gheusi (pseudonym Norbert Lorédan), a theater director, writer, and librettist. Corday's literary friends included French novelist Anatole France.
The Paris Front: an Unpublished Diary: 1914-1918 by Michel Corday, page 281, copyright © 1934, by E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publisher: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publication date: 1934
(3) The commander of the 7 Seaforth Highlanders on a soldier slightly wounded in the October 12, 1917 First Battle of Passchendaele, an action in the Third Battle of Ypres. Artillery bombardments destroyed terrain, turning farmland, irrigation channels, and rain to shellholes, mud, and deadly pools.
Passchendaele The Untold Story by Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, page 169, copyright © 1996 Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, publisher: Yale University Press, publication date: 2002
(4) In the spring of 1917, German forces on the Russian front waited to see what would come of the Russian Revolution, and whether Russia wound continue to fight. The July Kerensky Offensive provided one answer, and the collapse of the Russian army in its aftermath a fuller one. German forces advanced in late summer, taking the Russian Baltic Sea port of Riga on September 3. The German fleet simultaneously advanced, threatening to enter the Gulf of Finland leading to Petrograd. The island of Ösel is, in 2017, Saaremaa, Estonia.
A Naval History of World War I by Paul G. Halpern, pp. 216–217, copyright © 1994 by the United States Naval Institute, publisher: UCL Press, publication date: 1994
(5) Excerpt from an October 16, 1917 letter by German writer and officer Walter Flex to his family, written on the last day of his life. Flex took part in Operation Albion against Russia in the Baltic Sea and its coast including the port of Riga. He was shot and killed on the island of Ösel now, in 2017, Saaremaa, Estonia. 'Wurche' was Ernst Wurche, the subject of Flex's novella 'A Wanderer Between Two Worlds.' Augustovo and Tarnopol, Poland, were then in Russian Poland, east of Warsaw.
The Lost Voices of World War I, An International Anthology of Writers, Poets and Playwrights by Tim Cross, page 186, copyright © 1989 by The University of Iowa, publisher: University of Iowa Press, publication date: 1989
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