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Mount Olympus from Summerhill camp Salonica, October, 1917. Summerhill (or Summer Hill) Camp was a British infantry training base about five miles from Salonica.
Personifications of Alsace and Lorraine in a German postcard. Lorraine looks to France, but Alsace to Germany, a point made by the poem.
Saint Nicholas pulls his sled along a road stretched between two Christmas tree boughs and Christmas greetings. The Iron Cross below is dated 1917.
Peace on Earth, and Good Will toward Men. A French poilu seeks shelter in a soldier's home. A YMCA postcard by Geo. Dorival, 1918.
A Russian Cossack riding among refugees fleeing before a Central Power advance. The Russians adopted a scorched-earth policy in the months-long retreat before the German-Austro-Hungarian Gorlice-Tarnow Offensive of the spring, summer, and fall 1915, with Cossacks accused of burning homes and crops to deny them to the advancing enemy, and to prevent civilians from remaining behind and providing intelligence to the invader.
"The recall of Sarrail implied far more than the displacement of one individual. Guillaumat reached Salonika on December 22 [1917], only a few hours after Sarrail left. Quietly but firmly his hand-selected staff officers were weeded out and sent after their fallen idol as speedily as possible. . . . For one reason or another, the French command was fielding a new team." ((1), more)
"Here are my aims in this war. I fight firstly because there is a war and I am a soldier, secondly because this was inevitable, thirdly because I do not want to become a German, fourthly because they have arrived in our country and we must strive to make them leave or at least prevent them advancing further, and fifthly because they must pay for the destruction they have caused . . . As for Alsace Lorraine, I could not care less." ((2), more)
"On Christmas Eve, the Royal Flying Corps made its first avowed reprisal raid on Germany. Ten aircraft droned over the misty Rhine valley to bomb Mannheim in daylight. A bridge over the Neckar was demolished, and fires were seen burning in the city. Four bombs crashed on the main railway station. A Swiss account of the mid-morning attack was read in London with considerable satisfaction and some regrets. The Kaiser's special train, it informed, had left the station only half an hour before the bombs struck." ((3), more)
"This was the fourth bloodstained Christmas spent far from home and hearth, far from the hometown church tower and the familiar ringing of the bells.On the night of December 24–25, yesteryear's joyous night of parties, a violent snowstorm struck, whipped up into a blizzard by a big, glacial wind.In our billet, this was a sad Christmas Eve, as you can well imagine. To defend ourselves from the cold, we all went to bed early, rolled up in our meager blankets, packed tightly against each other. . . .The next day, as if by the wave of a magic wand, the wind calmed down completely, but a nice layer of snow brightened the landscape. Upon awakening, I was duly warned that I had to carry out, on this day consecrated to the birth of the Savior, the annoying functions of corporal-of-the-day." ((4), more)
"That night not one of us slept; we were very cold and we were afraid. All around us were drunken, unruly men, drunken with freedom as well as with alcohol. Bands of them were passing through Botushany after dark; shouting, singing, swearing their way past our hiding-place — yes, hiding-place. It had come to that; we had to hide, because we were afraid of our own soldiers. As they passed, we would hold our breath and speak in whispers; a sharp tap from Mamasha now and then would remind us that even a whisper was too loud. And more than once, during that black, dreadful night, we heard a peasant-woman's shrill, desperate cry for help." ((5), more)
(1) Until December 10, 1917, General Maurice Sarrail commanded an Allied force on the Salonica Front in Greece that included French, British, Serbian, Russian, and Italian troops, as well as a battalion of Montenegrin soldiers. His offensive in May, 1917 had been an abject failure, in part because of failures in communications between units of the joint army. A Republican, with strong political support in Paris, Sarrail was removed by the new Prime Minister and Minister of War Georges Clemenceau. General Adolphe Guillaumat would begin preparing for the 1918 campaign.
The Gardeners of Salonika by Alan Palmer, page 169, copyright © 1965 by A. W. Palmer, publisher: Simon and Schuster, publication date: 1965
(2) Summary by a soldier of the French 272nd Infantry Regiment on his war aims at the end of 1917, when the Allies had suffered clear defeats in Russia's departure from the war following the Bolshevik Revolution, and in Italy's defeat in the Battle of Caporetto. The French lost the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine to Germany in the Franco Prussian war of 1870–71.
Paths of Glory: The French Army 1914-18 by Anthony Clayton, pp. 158–159, copyright © Anthony Clayton 2003, publisher: Cassell, publication date: 2005
(3) Beginning in 1915, first Zeppelin and Schütte-Lanz airships, then Gotha and other large multi-engine planes had bombed London and other cities in England. The Royal Flying Corps' December 24, 1917 raid on Mannheim, Germany was the first reprisal raid on a primarily civilian site in Germany itself.
The Sky on Fire by Raymond H. Fredette by Raymond H. Fredette, page 178, copyright © 1966, 1976, 1991 by Raymond H. Fredette, publisher: Smithsonian Institution Press, publication date: 1991
(4) Excerpt from the notebooks of French Infantry Corporal Louis Barthas. He had been in the 296th Regiment which had been implicated in the army mutinies of the spring and early summer. The regiment had been dissolved and its men assigned to other units, Barthas to a regiment from Breton. On December 23, 1917 they went into two weeks of rest.
Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914-1918 by Louis Barthas, pp. 350, 351, copyright © 2014 by Yale University, publisher: Yale University Press, publication date: 2014
(5) Excerpt from the entry for December 16 (December 29, Old Style), 1917, covering the last several days, from the diary of Florence Farmborough, an English nurse serving with the Russian Red Cross. Farmborough's unit had been with the Russian Army in Romania when the Bolshevik Revolution brought Vladimir Lenin to power. He had consistently called for an immediate end to the war, and Russia had agreed an armistice on December 15 with the Central Powers. On December 26, Farmborough's unit received orders to make their way to Moscow as best they could. She traveled first to Odessa on the Black Sea before going on to Moscow, finally reaching it after a journey of 13 days.
Nurse at the Russian Front, a Diary 1914-18 by Florence Farmborough, page 363, copyright © 1974 by Florence Farmborough, publisher: Constable and Company Limited, publication date: 1974
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