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Intermission at a French theater, 1915. Women and a girl knit, socks perhaps, for soldiers at the front, as does a Red Cross nurse seated between two sleepy soldiers, one — from an Algerian regiment — visibly wounded. An older man reads the news. Illustrated by A. Guillaume, the postcard is captioned in the languages of the Entente Allies, French, English, and Russian.
Embossed postcard of the flag and coins of Russia, with fixed exchange rates for major currencies including Germany, Austria-Hungary, England, the Latin Monetary Union, Netherlands, and the United States of America. The Russian Ruble equaled 100 Kopeks. Tsar Nicholas II is on the obverse of most of the gold and silver coins; Tsar Alexander III is on the 7 1/2 ruble gold piece.
The Russo-Turkish frontier from Cram's 1896 Railway Map of the Turkish Empire. The Black Sea is in the northwest, Persia to the southeast. The area had a large Armenian and Christian population, and was a principal site of the Armenian Genocide and of Russian military successes.
A French officer charging into battle in a watercolor by Fernand Rigouts. The original watercolor on deckle-edged watercolor paper is signed F. R. 1917, and addressed to Mademoiselle Henriette Dangon.
Russian troops fleeing a solitary German soldier. The Russian First Army invaded Germany in August 1914, and defeated the Germans in the Battle of Gumbinnen on the 20th. In September the Germans drove them out of Russia in the First Battle of the Masurian Lakes. In September and October, a joint German, Austro-Hungarian offensive drove the Russians back almost to Warsaw. Illustration by E. H. Nunes.
"— A terrible and distressing cruelty still reigns, in the name of patriotism, over the hearts of those who ever express their views — even the women. An actress, who has taken up hospital nursing, declares with satisfaction that this winter there have been no trench truces (that is not correct, by the way), and expresses delight that the French are shooting Germans who try to fraternise. What a strange perversion of decent feeling that is! Thus, again, Captain N——— considered the following trick positively heroic and laudable: at one point in the line trench truces had given rise to regular contact between the two lines, but one day, when a German N.C.O. was coming across in perfect confidence, the French shot him." ((1), more)
"By its very principles and constitution, tsarism is obliged to be infallible, perfect and above reproach. There is no form of government which calls for more intelligence, honesty, cautious prudence, orderly reasoning, far-sightednesss and talent ; and outside it, I mean outside the rank of its administrative oligarchy, there is nothing—no machinery of supervision, no autonomous mechanism, no established parties, no social groups, no legal or traditional organization of the public will.So when a mistake is made, it is always discovered too late. And there is no one to repair it." ((2), more)
"On January 14 [1916] an unexpected Russian offensive began against the center of the [Turkish] Third Army. The attack began on the dominating heights of the Aras River, followed by further attacks in the sections adjoining on the south. For some reason the commander, Mahmud Kiamil Pasha, happened to be in Constantinople just then and the German chief of staff was absent in Germany to recover from a case of typhus. Abdul Kerim Pasha let the army.The Russians broke the center of the Third Army." ((3), more)
"January also was a month of back-breaking work. Each platoon began by removing the mud from the immediate vicinity of its dugout, by means of shovels, buckets, and pumps, and then, having firm ground underfoot once more, set about establishing communications with its neighbors. In the Adinfer forest, where our artillery was positioned, teams of woodcutters were set to strip the branches off young trees and split them into long struts. The trench walls were sloped off and entirely reveted with this material. Also, numerous culverts, drainage ditches and sumps were dug, so that things were once more made bearable. What really made a difference were those deep sumps that were dug through the surface clay and enabled water to drain into the absorptive chalk beneath." ((4), more)
"3rd January [Old Style]At any moment first aid work might be awaiting us in the trenches. The New Year has brought renewed hope. We trust implicitly in the loyalty and patriotism of our soldiers; we know that they are longing for an opportunity to win back all the fertile territory which the enemy has succeeded in wrenching from Russia. They are now rested and their ranks reinforced; the future seems reassuringly bright. 'Wait!' we tell each other. 'Wait! a little more patience and we shall see the victories which 1916 has in store for us.'" ((5), more)
(1) Undated January, 1916 entry from the diary of Michel Corday, a senior civil servant in the French government. Although there were instances of fraternization on the front at Christmastime, 1915, it was suppressed by military leadership, in part by regular shelling of enemy lines.
The Paris Front: an Unpublished Diary: 1914-1918 by Michel Corday, pp. 133, 134, copyright © 1934, by E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publisher: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publication date: 1934
(2) Entry for January 13, 1916 from the memoirs of Maurice Paléologue, French Ambassador to Russia. Tsar Nicholas had taken command of the army in the summer of 1915, risking, as Paléologue observed at the time, having its failures placed on his shoulders. In the preceding days, the Ambassador had written about the failure of the Russian offensive in Galicia, a secret conference of Socialists, and Rasputin's increasing sway over the church. Among the pleasure of reading the Ambassador from republican France are his observations on Russia, the Russian people, their arts, and government.
An Ambassador's Memoirs Vol. II by Maurice Paléologue, pp. 149, 150, publisher: George H. Doran Company
(3) Excerpt from the summary of events in 1916 on the Russo-Turkish front in the Caucasus Mountains by German General Liman von Sanders. With the failure of the Allied Gallipoli Campaign, Turkey was in a position to redeploy its troops to other fronts. Russia struck before the redeployment could complete. Sanders was chief of the German military mission to Turkey, and had commanded Turkish forces on the Gallipoli Peninsula prior to the Allied evacuation in January.
Five Years in Turkey by Liman von Sanders, page 124, publisher: The Battery Press with War and Peace Books, publication date: 1928 (originally)
(4) Sebastian Jünger on the improving the German trenches in January, 1916. Adinfer is west of the Arras-Péronne road. German Chief of the General Staff Erich von Falkenhayn was fighting a defensive war on the Western Front. Allied troops were often shocked by the quality of German trenches.
Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger, page 60, copyright © 1920, 1961, Translation © Michael Hoffman, 2003, publisher: Penguin Books, publication date: 2003
(5) Florence Farmborough, an English nurse serving with the Russian Red Cross, writing on January 16, 1916 (January 3 Old Style). On the same day, Maurice Paléologue, French Ambassador to Russia, recorded that in the capital of Petrograd, and with the failure of the Allied Gallipoli Campaign, people had given up hope of capturing Constantinople,and with that possibility foreclosed, saw little point in continuing the war.
Nurse at the Russian Front, a Diary 1914-18 by Florence Farmborough, page 167, copyright © 1974 by Florence Farmborough, publisher: Constable and Company Limited, publication date: 1974
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