Articles from 1917
There are canine sentries on duty on both sides in the Great War, and dogs that are dispatch-bearers. Marquis, a French dog, fell from a bullet-wound almost at the feet of a group of French soldiers to whom he bore a message across a shell-raked stretch of country. But the message was delivered!
Attached is a news report from a 1917 issue of THE ATLANTA GEORGIAN announcing:
Czar Nicholas decided to abdicate the Russian throne only after he had been held up by soldiers and the necessity for such action impressed upon him, according to a dispatch printed in DIE FRANKFURTER ZEITUNG…
Also included in the report were the text of a speech delivered by the Czar which called for national unity.
Attached is a review of a biography covering the life and times of Brigadier General John Rawlins (1831 – 1869). Rawlins distinguished himself as the Chief of Staff to General Ulysses S. Grant during the American Civil War. It is explained that the two met while Grant was engaged as a sales clerk at a leather shop which was owned by Rawlin’s brother; at the outbreak of the war, in 1861, Grant’s skill as an officer became clear to many and with each promotion he was able to secure Rawlins’ certain advancements in grade. By 1863 Rawlins was promoted to Brigadier General. During Grant’s term in the White House, Rawlins served as Secretary of War.
The author of the book, Major-General James Harrison Wilson, is remembered as the man who captured Confederate President Jefferson Davis in flight; the review of his autobiography can be read here.
During much of the war, inventors from all combatant nations had been trying to make a artillery projectile that could eradicate the obstacle that had become one of the symbols of trench warfare: barbed-wire. No one seemed up to the task and in the end, wire-cutters were still the best way to deal with the problem.
This article is about one inventor’s failed effort to create a time fuse artillery shell that would deploy hooks that grab the wire as it goes speeding by and thereby saving the day. Needless to say, the hook thing didn’t work out terribly well and the difficulty inherit with time fuse artillery shells would be perfected in the inter-war years.
No doubt, the fashionable minds who sat so comfortably in America, far removed from the dung and destruction of the European war, would thumb through magazines such as Leslie’s, Collier’s or Current History looking for fashion’s newest thing. How pleased these fops must have been that the ink-stained photogravure boys didn’t let them down! The Brothers Guiterman in Minnesota must have been numbered among these macaronis because they seemed to have been the first to begin production of a trench coat intended solely for civilian production (although it must be remembered that during the war, trench coats were a private purchase item, available only to officers sold only by haberdashers and privately-owned military furnishing establishments).
Just prior to the death of Auguste Rodin (1840 – 1917), the Welsh poet and essayist, Arthur Symons
AUGUSTE RODIN PRIS SUR LA VIE at once a document and a living thing. The main interest lies in the exactitude with which it records the actual words of Rodin, much as he must have spoken them y
We are told that the attached picture could only have been snapped in the more eccentric parts of Britain during the Great War and that it serves as graphic proof that the farm labor shortage was as dire as the farmers declared that it was.
The war has changed many things, and it may have altered conceptions of military smartness as well. For from Paris, the home of ‘mode’ and ‘chic’, comes a daily fashion hint from the front that is upsetting. It is from Henri Barbusse (1873 – 1935), author of the novel Under Fire
A schematic plan of a German World War One Zeppelin that illustrates the airship’s bombay, crew quarters and gondola.
An efficient coal-based fuel has never really been the reality, however the French would make advancements with the technology in the early forties. The accompanying photograph depicts one of the earliest methods for the creation of a coal and gas blended fuel source that was created as a result of the World War I gas rationing in Britain.
The attached magazine illustration is from an ad for a commercially produced musette bag for American officers during World War One.
American Army officers, like the men in their ranks, had no particular need to ever bother with a musette (we have learned that a musette is a small French wind instrument, not unlike a bag-pipe). The bag pictured here was intended for personal effects that would be needed while on the march: stationery,toiletries, housewives).
Due to the French prowess involving all matters military during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, the English language is lousey with French military terms, many of which are very much in use today.
When the United States Congress declared war on Imperial Germany in April of 1917, the New York pamphleteer Halsey William Wilson (1868 – 1954) wasted little time in collecting a list of the numerous war crimes committed by the Germans up to that time in order to launch a mass printing of a 31 page pamphlet that would sell for five cents each. The heinous use of poison gas was listed on page nine.
The 1917 publication of The life of Algernon Charles Swinburne
A bombshell that struck literary England a little past that last mid-century has been re-echoing in the recently published ‘Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne’ by Edmund Gosse. The shell was the volume called ‘Poems and Ballads’ a cursory knowledge of which probably places it in many minds as one of the bad books of literature…
The attached article, How Well Our Chemical Industry Has Been Mobilized for War is an abstract from a 1917 issue of THE JOURNAL OF COMMERCE which discussed how readily American chemists embraced their roll after the United States committed itself to the war.
There is much talk of the procurement of potash, toluol and trinitrotoluol which were necessary elements in the manufacture of gas.
During the earliest days of the war the British and Empire armies were seldom issued grenades, but the need for such weaponry became apparent once it was clear to all that trench warfare was going to be the norm. The earliest grenades (improvised by both sides) were simply food tins that were jam-packed with an explosive mixed with nails, glass shards and bits of iron. By 1915 grenade production was in full swing and British historians have estimated that throughout the course of the war on the Western Front, British and Commonwealth forces had used fifteen million hand-grenades.
The following article concern a British shrapnel grenade that is of the heavy friction pattern.
Under the French Flag is a W.W. I memoir by M. Macdonald in which the author tells the story of an Englishman who chose to sign up for the French Army due to their lax recruiting regulations which provided for the enlistment of men as old as fifty years of age. The reviewer believed the author recounted some interesting scenes of early-war France and French barracks life.
Click here to read articles about W.W. I poetry.
The attached mechanical drawing depicts one of the most common ignition grenades that were put to use by British and Commonwealth forces during World War One. The Ball grenade was essentially a cast-iron sphere that measured three inches in diameter and it was one of any number of British grenades that used the Brock lighter.
An Honorable Mention was certainly in order for the British inventor Edward Dartford Holmes who thought up a three tiered, time fuse anti-artillery shell:
Briefly, his scheme calls for a shrapnel shell containing a number of compartments which are each exploded in turn at predetermined intervals.
