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November 9 - November 22, 2017
Delighted by this potential warfare in England’s backyard, the Germans secretly sold weapons to both sides.
belonged firmly under British control; Rudyard Kipling agreed, considering Irish Catholics “the Orientals of the West.” Milner began traveling England making
Secretly, he raised funds to buy arms for the Protestant militia, with Kipling contributing an astonishing £30,000, the equivalent of well over $3 million today.
At her trial the next month, the murder would be judged a crime of passion for which a woman, by definition not in control of her emotions, could not be held accountable. She was acquitted.
In Vienna, Emperor Franz Joseph
seemed remarkably unperturbed by the death of the nephew he disliked.
On July 28 Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia and the following day Austrian gunboats on the Danube began shelling the Serbian capital, Belgrade—the first actual shots of the First World War.
“This country has gone wild with joy at the prospect of war with Serbia.”
Tsar Nicholas II waffled, issuing contradictory orders, now for full mobilization, now for partial mobilization. Trying to halt the momentum toward war, he exchanged telegrams with the Kaiser—in English, which they both spoke fluently.
Having humiliatingly lost a war to Japan a decade earlier, the Russian high command felt anxious to prove its mettle.
exactly 42 days.
In the west, however, Belgium rejected Germany’s demand and started blowing up railway tunnels and bridges on its border. Berlin, now infuriated and vowing vengeance, had never factored this possibility into its planning.
Even in Austria-Hungary, with its restless mix of ethnic groups to whom mobilization orders had to be issued in more than half a dozen languages, the authorities were amazed that so few men refused the call-up.
historian Barbara Tuchman wrote, “The
working class went to war willingly, even eagerly, like the middle class, like the upper...
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British public reacted more emotionally, for citizens of a great imperial power always like to think of themselves as anointed protectors of the weak.
“A single worry tormented me at that time, as with so many others, would we not reach the Front too late?” wrote a young German corporal, Adolf Hitler.
The army Britain fielded in France was not large—when war broke out there were more soldiers on active duty in India than in the British Isles—but
Some troops who had served in India greeted the French in the only foreign language they knew, Hindi.
Desperate to get rid of anything that slowed them down, officers ordered the disheartened troops to abandon excess equipment and supplies; pursuing Germans were thrilled to come upon large piles of ammunition, new boots, canned food, clothing, sides of beef.
Like the British, recent German and French experience of war had been of minor colonial conflicts with badly armed Africans and Asians:
Neither side had spent much time on the receiving end of fire by machine guns or other modern weaponry.
The new generation of long-range, fast-loading artillery, for instance, could leave your troops under a downpour of shells from guns miles away and out of sight.
Russian forces outnumbered their adversaries by three to one, and, in cavalry, by eight to one.
There were, for example, little more than half as many rifles available as soldiers who needed them,
Many Russian generals were elderly and overweight;
Russia was a peasant country and roughly one-third of its millions of conscripts were illiterate.
Unfamiliar with modern technology and in need of cooking fuel, soldiers sometimes chopped down telegraph poles for firewood.
soldiers tended to fire on any airplane, including their own.
Not having seen one before, they assumed such an exotic invention must be German.
the Germans now controlled all passable roads. From one entire army corps (well over 25,000 soldiers) under Samsonov’s command, only a single man returned to Russia.
60 German trains were needed to transport them to POW camps.
it lost his nerve and fled home by car. All in all, during a month of fighting, the Russians lost 310,000 men killed, wounded, or taken prisoner, as well as 650 artillery pieces.
Reflecting the power structure of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, three-quarters of its officers were of German-speaking stock, while only one enlisted man in four understood the language.
Austrian cavalrymen made excellent targets in their brilliant blue-and-red uniforms (which, unlike the French, they would not abandon for several years).
the government quietly asked charities not to aid jobless men eligible to enlist.
he intended to hire only men who had been at the front. Hundreds of other landowners and employers followed his example—especially
they did not have enough spades, for instance, and sometimes had to dig with pitchforks taken
from Belgian barns.
Germans with regulation helmets seem to realize that the little spikes on top only made the wearers better targets.
(These would not be removed until 1916.)
“county men of position and influence, accustomed to hunting, polo and field sports.”
The only horses in sight were dead ones.
until your feet swelled, went numb, and began to burn painfully as if touched by fire.
pump would be going constantly.
that of human waste.
Many soldiers simply relieved themselves in the nearest shell hole.
if a shell struck one, it blasted the contents in all directions, leaving ...
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Emmeline Pankhurst: “It is unthinkable,” she stormed in a magazine interview, “that English-women should meet German women to discuss terms of peace while the husbands, sons and brothers of those women . . . are murdering our men.”
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