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Turkish War Minister Ismail Enver Pasha planned and took command of a winter invasion of Russia in the mountains of the Turkish/Russian border. Poor planning by Turkish commanders and dreadful weather destroyed much of the Turkish invasion force. From December 27, the Russians held off repeated Turkish attacks until counter-attacking on January 2. In the follow two weeks, the Russians destroyed much of what was left of the Turkish army. The caption explains the destruction of three invading armies, each of about 55,000 men in the Battle of Sarikamish. Illustration from The Great War magazine, Part 34.
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.
A mass of German troops bear an enormous egg striped in the black, white, and red of the german flag. Atop the egg, a cannon is fired by troops with a Hungarian flag. The target, diminutive in the distance, is Paris, Eiffel Tower gray against the brown city.The watercolor is labeled,Husvét . Páris piros tojása . 1918Easter . Red eggs for Paris . 1918The front of the card is postmarked 1918-04-05 from Melököveso.The card is a Feldpostkarte, a field postcard, from Asbach Uralt, old German cognac. Above the brand name, two German soldiers wheel a field stove past a crate containing a bottle of the brandy under the title Gute Verpflegung, Good Food. Above the addressee is written Einschreiben, enroll, and Nach Ungarn, to Hungary. The card is addressed to Franz Moritos, and is postmarked Hamburg, 1918-03-30. A Hamburg stamp also decorates the card.A hand-painted postcard by Schima Martos. , Germany on registered fieldpost card, 1918, message: Red Egg for Paris, Easter, 1918.The German advance in Operation Michael in the March, 1918 nearly broke the Allied line, and threatened Paris, putting it once again in range of a new German supergun capable of hitting the city from 70 miles away.
German postcard map of the Western Front in Flanders, looking south and including Lille, Arras, Calais, and Ostend. In the Battle of the Yser in October, 1914, the Belgian Army held the territory south of the Yser Canal, visible between Nieuport, Dixmude, and Ypres (Ypern). Further north is Passchendaele, which British forces took at great cost in 1917.
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.
"The Russians have just inflicted a defeat on the Turks near Sarykamish, on the Kars-Erzerum road.This success is a particularly fine piece of work as our Ally's offensive is in a region of mountains as high as the Alps, intersected by precipices and with passes often over 2,500 metres in height. It is appalling cold at this season of the year, and there are incessant snowstorms. No roads and the whole region laid waste. The army of the Caucasus is performing prodigies of valour every day." ((1), more)
"During the last nine days there has been heavy fighting on the left bank of the Vistula, in the sector between the Bzura and the Ravka. On January 2 the Germans succeeded in carrying the important Borjymov position : their front is thus no more than sixty kilometres from Warsaw.This situation comes in for very strong comment in Moscow, if I am to credit the information given me by an English journalist who was dining in the Slaviansky Bazaar only yesterday: 'In all the drawing-rooms and clubs at Moscow,' he said, 'there is great irritation at the turn military events are taking. No one can understand this suspension of all our attacks and these continuous retreats which look as if they would never end. But it is not the Grand Duke Nicholas who gets the blame but the Emperor and still more the Empress. The most absurd stories are told about Alexandra Feodorovna ; Rasputin is accused of being in German pay and the Tsaritsa is simply called the Niemka [the German woman] . . . '" ((2), more)
"Day by day the limping figures grow more numerous on the pavement, the pale bandaged heads more frequent in passing carriages. In the stalls at the theatres and concerts there are many uniforms; and their wearers usually have to wait till the hall is emptied before they hobble out on a supporting arm. Most of them are very young, and it is the expression of their faces which I should like to picture and interpret as being the very essence of what I have called the look of Paris. They are grave, these young faces: one hears a great deal of the gaiety in the trenches, but the wounded are not gay. Neither are they sad, however. They are calm, meditative, strangely purified and matured. It is as though their great experience had purged them of pettiness, meanness and frivolity, burning them down to the bare bones of character, the fundamental substance of the soul, and shaping that substance into something so strong and finely tempered that for a long time to come Paris will not care to wear any look unworthy of the look on their faces." ((3), more)
"9.1.15 Parade at 8 a.m. I take four men to dig communication trench. Work until 5 p.m. and reach billet at 6.30 p.m. The trenches are now waist deep in water, part of section returned early, being soaked through, breast-high. My party had to run the gauntlet on returning across the open in preference to coming through the trenches!" ((4), more)
"The [Turkish] 5th Expeditionary Force reached Diyarbakir on 10 January, by which time the situation in the Caucasus had been transformed out of all recognition. The following day Halil Bey learned that his orders had been revised: he was now to make for Erzurum, to reinforce the garrison there. In all he brought with him about nine thousand men, of whom perhaps 75 per cent were combat-fit, and received a warm welcome. However, he also brought something far less acceptable: spotted typhus. It ran through the garrison like wildfire, and Hafiz Hakki was an early victim; he died on 12 February, to be replaced in command of the Third Army by Mahmut Kamil Pasha, who retained the German, Guse, as his chief of staff." ((5), more)
(1) Entry from the memoirs of Maurice Paléologue, French Ambassador to Russia, for Wednesday, January 6, 1915. Turkish War Minister Ismail Enver Pasha planned and took command of a winter invasion of Russia in the mountains of the Turkish/Russian border. From December 27, the Russians held off repeated Turkish attacks until counter-attacking on January 2. In the follow two weeks, the Russians destroyed much of what was left of the Turkish army, the remnants of which retreated to Erzerum. Estimates of Turkish casualties in the Battle of Sarikamish vary widely, from 30,000 to 90,000 dead, and from 7,000 to many times that taken prisoner. Kars was the great Russian fortress on the Russo-Turkish border, Erzerum the Turkish.
An Ambassador's Memoirs Vol. I by Maurice Paléologue, pp. 237, 238, publisher: George H. Doran Company, publication date: 1925
(2) Entry from the memoirs of Maurice Paléologue, French Ambassador to Russia, for Thursday, January 7, 1915. By that date, the Russians had invaded and fled East Prussia, and seized and yielded Galicia in Austria-Hungary. German and Austro-Hungarian forces were advancing for the third time into Polish Russia. Grand Duke Nicholas was Commander of the Russian Army. Paléologue goes on to defend the German-born Empress Alexandra, noting that she lived in England from the age of six when her mother died, and that, 'in her inmost being she has become entirely Russian.'
An Ambassador's Memoirs Vol. I by Maurice Paléologue, page 238, publisher: George H. Doran Company, publication date: 1925
(3) Conclusion of 'The Look of Paris', the first chapter of Edith Wharton's Fighting France. Wharton writes of the look of the city from mobilization in August 1914, through the disappearance of men from the city, the arrival of refugees, and the arrival of the wounded in January and February 1915, wounded who initially had been diverted from the capital, but now make their grave presence felt and visible.
Fighting France by Edith Wharton, pp. 40, 41, copyright © 1915, by Charles Scribner's Sons, publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons, publication date: 1915
(4) Entry for January 9, 1915 from the pocket diary of Corporal. A Letyford, 5th Field Company, Royal Engineers, writing of the flooded marshland in Flanders. For the prior days of the month, his brief entries about water that is knee-deep, that is four feet deep, that is waist-deep. He and his men build a dam against water that is running from German trenches, they fix pumps, build a bridge, and rebuild it after it is 'knocked into the stream.' It rains constantly, and the men are covered in mud. German troops fire on them as they work.
1915, The Death of Innocence by Lyn Macdonald, pp. 19, 20, copyright © 1993 by Lyn Macdonald, publisher: Henry Holt and Company, publication date: 1993 (Great Britain); 199
(5) Excerpt from Roger Ford's account of the Battle of Sarikamish and its aftermath in the Russo-Turkish frontier. The Turkish invasion of Russia had been a disaster — the transformation Ford writes of — for Turkey and its soldiers, and the Turks desperately needed reinforcements. In winter 1915, typhus was raging elsewhere, including in Serbia.
Eden to Armageddon: World War I in the Middle East by Roger Ford, page 141, copyright © Roger Ford 2010, publisher: Pegasus Books, publication date: 2010
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