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Map of Syria, Palestine, Turkey, and Mesopotamia from the Baedeker 1912 travel guide Palestine and Syria with Routes through Mesopotamia and Babylonia and with the Island of Cyprus.
British soldiers pushing an ambulance through the mud. A mounted horseman is on the road ahead.
Prosperity and victory in 1915: an official New Year's postcard of the Bavarian Red Cross, with a message dated December 31, 1914, postmarked January 1, 1915.
Memorial statue to Prime Minister David Lloyd George in Parliament Square, London, United Kingdom. © 2013 John M. Shea
The conditions British Troops faced in Flanders and Passchendaele.
"3. The Seventh Army pertaining to Jilderim will be transported to the Sinai front. The troops now on the Sinai Front will be under the Army Group Jilderim as long as the Seventh Army remains on the Sinai front.4. The Army Group Jilderim will conduct its operations independently on the Sinai front and in the separate Sanjak of Jerusalem, but Jilderim will keep the commander in chief in Syria and West Arabia informed." ((1), more)
"In No Man's Land the wounded still lay in the mud. Their shouting and sobbing kept everyone's nerves on edge. Those in shell holes generally drowned there. Slowly they slipped down the muddy banks into the water below, too weak to hold themselves up. Their feeble whispers could not be heard by comrades passing by. As time went on No Man's Land thus became converted into a vast limbo of abandoned dead and dying. Each shell hole with blood on its water usually meant another corpse entombed below." ((2), more)
"A railway strike has dislocated rail-transport throughout Russia. Finland has proclaimed herself a republic. Strikes and riots are still rampant, while famine is augmenting the general hardship. At supper there was a pessimistic feeling among us that our Red Cross Otryad was slowly but surely closing down. Alas for our hopes and ambitions! Alas! for poor, suffering Russia." ((3), more)
"What bearing had all this on Third Ypres? By 11 October [1917] it had been raining steadily in Flanders for a week. There could be no reason for taking a more hopeful view of operations there than when Lloyd George, before the weather had broken, had spoken so disparagingly on the subject eight days earlier. Nor was the Prime Minister inclined to do so. . . .Far from being hopeful, the Prime Minister predicted failure in the attempts to capture even the Klerken Ridge. He 'would call the War Cabinet's attention to this in three weeks' time'. . . .Indeed there was a large positive consequence of Lloyd George's chillingly negative announcement that, in three weeks' time, the War Cabinet would assemble to record the lack of success of the operation. This forewarning of failure and futility constituted his authorization for the campaign to continue." ((4), more)
"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 . . ." ((5), more)
(1) Excerpt from the order of Turkish War Minister Ismail Enver to his commanders in October, 1917, quoted by German General and commander of the Germany military mission to Turkey Liman von Sanders. Sanders notes that the Group Jilderim — Turkish for 'lightning' — was organized not with military assistance from German officers as was common during the war, but as a German army group with German officers and a German commander. The army was being collected at Aleppo, whence it could be directed to Mesopotamia and the reconquest of Baghdad or to Palestine for the defense of Gaza and Jerusalem, or for an offensive against Egypt. Enver chose the latter.
Five Years in Turkey by Liman von Sanders, page 180, publisher: The Battery Press with War and Peace Books, publication date: 1928 (originally)
(2) Excerpt from Leon Wolff's In Flanders Fields, the 1917 Campaign on the horrendous conditions in which men lived and died in British general Douglas Haig's Flanders campaign. The Battle of Poelcapelle, yet another British attack in the Third Battle of Ypres, was fought on October 9, 1917 with less preparation than its predecessors. Men drowned in mud from which they could neither extricate themselves, nor be extricated.
In Flanders Fields, the 1917 Campaign by Leon Wolff, page 230, copyright © 1958 by Leon Wolff, publisher: The Viking Press, publication date: 1958
(3) Excerpt from the entry for October 10, (September 27, Old Style), 1917 from the diary of Florence Farmborough, an English nurse serving with the Russian Red Cross. Farmborough's unit was then in Romania where the Russians had participated in a Romanian offensive until being ordered on July 25 by Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky to stop all offensive action. The failure of Russia's July 1 offensive was a further step in the collapse of Russian society, the war effort, and the Provisional Government. Some of Farmborough's colleagues in her Otryad (Отряд), her squad, had already left when she was writing. The province of Finland was following Kerensky's proclamation of a Russian republic.
Nurse at the Russian Front, a Diary 1914-18 by Florence Farmborough, page 320, copyright © 1974 by Florence Farmborough, publisher: Constable and Company Limited, publication date: 1974
(4) At the last meeting of the British War Policy Committee on October 11, 1917, there was little discussion about the Third Battle of Ypres, even though the government of Prime Minister Lloyd George anticipated failure and could have stopped the battle, but let it stumble on. Rather there was a lengthy discussion of where to focus attention other than on the western front: Italy? Palestine?
Passchendaele The Untold Story by Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, pp. 153 and 155, copyright © 1996 Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, publisher: Yale University Press, publication date: 2002
(5) 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
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