Search by or
Search: Quotation Context Tags
A child soldier, the train station behind him, comes home with his gear and presents, through a city street decorated with German, Austrian, Hungarian, Turkish, and Bulgarian flags. Illustration by Carl Diehl.
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 Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck was commander of German forces in Africa, and successfully battled Allied forces for four years. Postcard from a painting by Fritz Grotemeyer.
The German light cruiser Königsberg on the Rufiji River, which flows to the Indian Ocean south of Dar es Salaam. In October 1914, the ship was a commerce raider hunting Allied ships in the Indian Ocean before hiding in the Rufiji to escape being taking by the British. Word of its discovery reached the Admiralty in London on October 30, 1914. The ship was finally sunk in July 1915.
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.
"The Somme Despatch is enlightening as an expression of the views of G.H.Q., which differ from those of the infantry—notably on the fighting quality and morale of our and the enemy's formations. The German is not what he was, but his falling off seems, on contact, to be no greater than ours. Without our superiority in guns where would we be? The French seem to be far ahead of us in recent attack technique, formation, and the co-ordination of rifle-grenade and automatic rifle-fire." ((1), more)
"Has the great dramatist of History conceived many episodes more pathetic than this baneful Tsarina and her pernicious companion weeping over the swelling corpse of the lustful moujik whom they loved so madly and Russia will curse for centuries?" ((2), more)
"What the Allied commanders under the leadership of Smuts have failed to understand is that von Lettow-Vorbeck, their tough, intelligent and cynical opponent, does not give a damn about the colony. Right from the start, this master of guerrilla warfare has seen it as his task to draw in as many enemy troops as possible, because every man, every gun, every bullet shipped to East Africa means one man, one gun, one bullet fewer on the Western Front. And the German has succeeded in this beyond his wildest dream: Smuts now has five times as many soldiers as von Lettow-Vorbeck, but has come nowhere near defeating the German." ((3), more)
"Smuts decided not to wait for the bases to be established further back, but to push on. On the night of 5 January 1917, Punjabi troops under the command of General Sheppard reached the Rufiji River at Kimbambabwe. A stream swollen to 800 yards by early rains confronted them, and their night crossing in Berthon boats was disastrously interrupted by herds of hippos, which upset two boats and drowned several soldiers; they could not fire at the hippos for fear of arousing the enemy on the other side." ((4), more)
"[The Russian army's] only action of any scale between early January and the Kerenski offensive of mid-summer was a stroke on the Baltic coast. Early in January they profited from withdrawal of German troops to stage a coup in Courland, against Mitau and Tukkum. They attacked by surprise, in an area of sand-dunes that masked the attackers' activity; did not bombard in advance; did not attack in 'waves'. In return for a few thousand casualties, they won a respectable success: thirty-six German guns and 8,000 prisoners. It was a symbol of the patterns prevailing on the eastern front. Minor attacks, launched by surprise, generally achieved far more impressive results than major ones preceded by heavy bombardment. The campaign of 1916 thus ended, fittingly enough, with a demonstration of Brusilov's correctness." ((5), more)
(1) Extract from the entry for January 2, 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, in Vauchelles-les-Quesnoy where Dunn spent 'three dull weeks.' Dunn's assessment of the quality of the German and British soldier is consistent with that of others, as is his take on the French soldier, whom some German writers found more flexible than the British. All three armies had lost their professional soldiers in the two and a half years the war had in progress.
The War the Infantry Knew 1914-1919 by Captain J.C. Dunn, page 288, copyright © The Royal Welch Fusiliers 1987, publisher: Abacus (Little, Brown and Company, UK), publication date: 1994
(2) Excerpt from the entry for January 3, 1917 from the memoirs of Maurice Paléologue, French Ambassador to Russia in the Russian capital Petrograd. The 'baneful Tsarina' is Alexandra, wife of Tsar Nicholas II, her 'pernicious companion' Anna Viroubova, the corpse they weep over that of Grigory Rasputin, murdered three days before.
An Ambassador's Memoirs Vol. III by Maurice Paléologue, page 136, publisher: George H. Doran Company
(3) On January 4, 1917, the British attacked a German unit at the village of Beho Beho in German East Africa. As in other encounters, the German forces inflicted heavy losses before slipping away from an attempted encirclement to fight on another day. The British were under the command of Jan Smuts of the Union of South Africa. The Germans were commanded by Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck.
The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War by Peter Englund, page 320, copyright © 2009 by Peter England, publisher: Vintage Books, publication date: 2012
(4) Jan Smuts of the Union of South Africa commanded the British and Dominion troops in the pursuit of German and native forces commanded by Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck who led a brilliant guerilla campaign in German East Africa. At the beginning of January, 1917, Smuts tried to capture Lettow-Vorbeck before the spring rains came, and on January 5, his time was running out. A Berthon boat was a collapsible boat, often used as a lifeboat.
Duel for Kilimanjaro: an account of the East African Campaign, 1914-1918 by Leonard Mosley, page 149, copyright © 1963 by Leonard Mosley, publisher: Ballantine Books, Inc., publication date: 1964
(5) Russian General Aleksei Brusilov launched his great offensive on June 4, 1916, with a brief preliminary bombardment, and across a broad front, collapsing the Austro-Hungarian army before him. By late the Russians had resumed unimaginatively hurling men against entrenched defenders. The January attack in Courland on the Baltic Sea was a miniature version of Brusilov's great offensive. Alexander Kerensky was a Socialist member of the Russian Duma who would become a minister in the revolutionary government. Mitau and Tukkum are now (2016) Tukums and Jelgava, Latvia.
The Eastern Front, 1914-1917 by Norman Stone, pp. 280–281, copyright © 1975 Norman Stone, publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons, publication date: 1975
1 2 Next
