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Stereo card view of wounded Belgian soldiers in an Antwerp hospital attended by a Red Cross nurse. The nurse attends to a severely wounded soldier whose head, face, and hands are swathed in bandages.
Vote Yes pin for Australian conscription, October 28, 1916, with the flags of Australia and Great Britain. A tin badge or tie-back pin in support of the Australian referendum on conscription, October 28, 1916. Australia voted no on this occasion and again, by a wider margin, in December, 1917.
Under her commander Captain Koenig, the German merchant submarine "Deutschland", largest in the world, ran the British blockade of Germany and British ships off the US coast to reach the neutral United States, arriving in Baltimore Harbor July 10, 1916.Postcard of the Deutschland of Bremen, and the tugboat Thomas F. Timmins of Baltimore.
Having stopped unrestricted submarine warfare after sinking the Lusitania in 1915, Germany resumed the policy on January 31, 1917. The campaign peaked in April 1917, and helped bring the United States into the war.
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.
"This afternoon the Grand Duchess Marie opened an exhibition at the corner of the Champ-d-Mars and the Moika, of prothetic appliances for facial injuries. She asked me to meet her there.. . . The wan light which came through the windows made this melancholy exhibition seem still more depressing. In every showcase photographs, plaster masks and wax figures alternated with appliances for demonstrating their working and uses. All these torn and battered faces, with bones fractured or missing and in some cases deprived of all resemblance to the human countenance, made a loathsome picture for which no word can be found in any tongue." ((1), more)
"The British decision [to implement conscription] set a precedent for the Dominions, New Zealand introducing compulsory military service in July 1916. Yet Canada did not follow suit until the last year of the war, and in Australia the government lost two referendums on the issue in October 1916 and December 1917, the first narrowly but the second by a wider margin. Opposition came partly from radicals and socialists but also from a portion of the Irish community and the Catholic hierarchy, antagonized by the suppression of the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916. Even in Britain itself conscription failed to solve the 'manpower' problem (a term that entered the political lexicon at this time). Fewer soldiers were recruited in 1916 with conscription than in 1915 without it." ((2), more)
"Did we really have such a good life in peacetime? Even if it might seem as if we did, we weren't really satisfied. I remember that many of us hoped for war so that things would get better for us. Whenever I remember how we used to worry about getting a job, about pay disputes and the length of the working day, it makes the thought of peace less attractive. But at the moment it seems like paradise, a time when you could buy all the bread, all the sausage, all the clothes we wanted. Not that that was much help to all the poor buggers with no money to buy anything! Perhaps the real crisis will come when we are all lucky enough to be at peace again." ((3), more)
"The Allies for most of 1916 responded to this steady hemorrhage of their shipping with antisubmarine tactics that were more of the same, adding whatever craft they could to the ineffective patrols on the patrolled routes while the admirals consistently overestimated the very few losses they were inflicting on the submarines. The submarine danger was so acute that in October the Admiralty prevailed on the War Office to agree to send troops going to or returning from Salonika and Egypt overland via Marseilles, which had the advantage of eliminating the long sea journey through the Bay of Biscay and western Mediterranean." ((4), more)
"For the last two days all the factories in Petrograd have been on strike. The workmen left the shops without giving any reason, and simply on an order issued by some mysterious committee.'. . . a party of strikers from the Baranovsky works besieged our establishment, shouting: "Down with the French! No more war!" Our engineers and foremen wanted to parley with them. They were received with stones and revolver shots. One French engineer and three French foremen were seriously wounded. The police had already arrived and soon realized that they could not cope with the situation. A squad of gendarmes then succeeded in forcing a way through the crowd, and went to fetch two infantry regiments which are in barracks quite near. The two regiments appeared a few minutes later, but instead of raising the siege of our factory, they fired on the police.'" ((5), more)
(1) Excerpts from the memoirs of Maurice Paléologue, French Ambassador to Russia, for Friday, October 27, 1916. The Grand Duchess later pulls the Ambassador aside to discuss her concerns for the war, her country, and its weak-willed ruler, Tsar Nicholas II, whom she sees as no match for his wife, Empress Alexandra.
An Ambassador's Memoirs Vol. III by Maurice Paléologue, pp. 71–72, publisher: George H. Doran Company
(2) In January 1916 Great Britain introduced conscription for single men aged 18 to 41 with the Military Service Act, extending it to married men in May, in both cases excluding Ireland outside of northern Ireland. The Dominions and colonies of the British Empire gave it access to a large pool of men including those of India and the Union of South Africa. The Easter Rising took place in April, 1916. Support for it grew enormously after the executions of 16 of its leaders in May and August.
Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy by David Stevenson, pp. 165–166, copyright © 2004 by David Stevenson, publisher: Basic Books, publication date: 2004
(3) Richard Stumpf, a German sailor on SMS Helgoland. On October 29, 1916, he watched the return of submarine U-53 which had accompanied the missing merchant submarine Bremen on its maiden voyage. Bremen vanished.
The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War by Peter Englund, pp. 311–312, copyright © 2009 by Peter England, publisher: Vintage Books, publication date: 2012
(4) The Greek port of Salonika was the gateway for Allied troops fighting the Bulgarian and other Central Power forces on the Salonika Front, as Egypt was for British forces fighting the Turks on the Syria/Palestine Front. Using the French port of Marseilles in the western Mediterranean Sea cut the exposure of troops and supplies being transported by sea.
A Naval History of World War I by Paul G. Halpern, page 389, copyright © 1994 by the United States Naval Institute, publisher: UCL Press, publication date: 1994
(5) Excerpts from the entry for October 31, 1916 from the memoirs of Maurice Paléologue, French Ambassador to Russia in the Russian capital Petrograd. That evening he attended a dinner in honor of the Japanese Ambassador, Viscount Motono, departing Russia after being appointed Minister for Foreign Affairs. The speaker in the second paragraph is one of two representatives from the Louis Renault motor works in Petrograd. The two infantry regiments that turned on the police were in turn driven back to their barracks by four regiments of Cossack cavalry.
An Ambassador's Memoirs Vol. III by Maurice Paléologue, pp. 73, 74, publisher: George H. Doran Company
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