Blogging the Nations at War: Christmas

 

This image has inspired me for decades. One of my goals when I joined the Corps was to go to
Mountain Warfare School and learn military skiing, all because of this image from childhood. 
(from The Nations at War, p232).

    Though it has been a few months since I posted on it, I  plan to continue my efforts to blog, chapter  by chapter,  The Nations at War: A Current History by Willis John Abbot, one of the first books to spark my love of history. However, I thought today would be a good day to look at the World War I Christmas Truce.

    This has become fairly well known in recent years, but I think many people would be shocked to discover that tales of the truce were told in news papers and "current affairs" books like this from the nearly the beginning, I believe this tale first appear in the 1915 edition. That is interesting in itself, but equally fascinating is the source of the information. Usually, the tale of the truce is told concerning the well documented British/German truces. But this account purports to be from an American with the French Foreign Legion, and so it discusses the truce in the French sectors. I cannot vouch for the veracity of the account.  

   (from The Nations at War, pp 176-177)

    This writer, Phil Rader by name, a young San Franciscan who had enlisted in the French Foreign Legion, was prolific of graphic sketches of life in the trenches. His description of a Christmas truce and its abrupt end throws a bright light on the psychology of war:

    "For twenty days we had faced that strip of land, forty-five feet wide, between our trench and that of the Germans, that terrible No Man's Land, dotted with dead bodies, crisscrossed by tangled masses of barbed wire. That little strip of land was as wide and as deep and as full of death as the Atlantic Ocean; as uncrossable as the spaces between stars; as terrible as human hate. And the sunshine of the bright Christmas morning fell on it as brightly as if it were a lover's lane or the aisle in some grand cathedral.

    "I don't know how the truce began in other trenches, but in our hole Nadeem began it-—Nadeem, a Turk, who believes that Mohammed and not Christ was the Prophet of God. The sunshine of the morning seemed to get into Nadeem's blood. He was only an enthusiastic boy, always childishly happy, and when we noticed, at the regular morning shooting hour, that the German trenches were silent Nadeem began to make a joke of it. He drew a target on a board, fastened it on a pole, and stuck it above the trench, shouting to the Germans:

"'See how well you can shoot.'

"Within a minute the target had been bulls'-eyed. Nadeem pulled it down, pasted little bits of white paper where shots had struck, and held it up again so that the Germans could see their score. In doing so, Nadeem's head appeared above the trench, and we heard him talking across the No Man's Land. Thoughtlessly I raised my head, too. Other men did the same. We saw hundreds of German heads appearing. Shouts filled the air. What miracle had happened? Men laughed and cheered. There was Christmas light in our eyes and I know there were Christmas tears in mine.

"There were smiles, smiles, smiles, where in days before there had been only rifle-barrels. The terror of No Man's Land fell away. The sounds of happy voices filled the air. We were all unhumanly happy for that one glorious instant—English, Portuguese, Americans, and even Nadeem, the Turk — and savages we had been, cavemen as we were, the awfulness of war had not filled the corners of our hearts where love and Christmas live. I think Nadeem was first to sense what had happened. He suddenly jumped out of the trench and began waving his hands and cheering. The hatred of war had been suddenly withdrawn and it left a vacuum in which we human beings rushed into contact with each other. You felt their handshakes—double handshakes, with both hands—in your heart.

"Nadeem couldn't measure human nature unerringly. He had been the first to feel the holiday spirit of Christmas Day, but, on this day after Christmas, he failed to sense the grimness of war that had fallen over the trenches during the night. Early in the morning he jumped out of the trench and began waving his hands again. John Street, an American, who had been an evangelist in St. Louis, jumped out with him, and began to shout a morning greeting to a German he had made friends with the day before.

"There was a sudden rattle of rifle-fire and Street fell dead, with a bullet through his head. The sun was shining down again on a world gone mad."

    A grim commentary on the war.  

Post-script, 12/16/2022:

 Since I originally posted this I have done a little bit of research on Phil Rader, who turns out to have been an interesting fellow. He might have been a pilot before the war, a Phil Rader was supposedly a mercenary pilot in the Mexican Revolution who participated in the first "dogfight."  He wrote, or had written from his comments, a series of articles, including the selection above, which were published in various newspapers in 1915. This specific account first appearing in March 1915 (see Riverside Daily Press, Volume XXX, Number 74, 27 March 1915). Later he left (deserted?) the Foreign Legion, joined the Royal Flying Corps, and flew for the British, before returning to the United States.  He was killed in June 1918 teaching aerobatics to a student pilot in California. 

All views in this blog are my own and represent the views of no other person, organization, or institution.

Blogging the Nations at War II

Continuing my efforts to blog, chapter  by chapter,  The Nations at War: A Current History by Willis John Abbot, one of the first books to spark my love of history.

I used this image in my classes to show differences in how combat is portrayed.
Note how the Germans are a mass of menacing grey in the distance, only the
Canadians, heroic and resolute, are individuals on this modern battlefield. Also,
one of the few credited art works in this book, it was painted by W. B. Wollen. p32.

Right away it is obvious that graphic images in this work may not match the text surrounding them.  The opening page of the chapter faces a full page art piece depicting the Battle of Ypres, which will not be discussed in the text until Chapter III.

Each chapter begins with a small picture by its first letter,
often these show anachronistic images of soldiers,
as this image from Chapter II shows "A French Cuirassier", p33.

Each chapter opens with a heading listing the topics it will cover, in this case: THE INVASION OF BELGIUM - DASH UPON PARIS - PLAN OF GERMAN
CAMPAIGN - HEROISM OF BELGIANS - MARVELOUS EFFICIENCY OF GERMANS - FALL OF NAMUR - SIR JOHN FRENCH's RETREAT - GERMAN DEFEAT AT THE MARNE - PARIS SAVED.

Original caption: "The map shows approximately the extent of the
German advance to September 6, 1914. The heavy lines
with arrow-tips show in a general way the main
German advance; the heavily dotted lines, routes of
parallel, but lesser columns. All the territory between
the line touching Antwerp, Ghent, Bruges, and Amiens
and the main line was filled with German troops.
Raiding parties also reached Ostend and Boulogne." p35.

The chapter opens by excoriating the Germans for the invasion of neutral Belgium & Luxemburg, quoting a speech by the German Chancellor: "We are now in a state of necessity, and necessity knows no law! . . . We were compelled to override the just protest of the Luxemburg and Belgian governments. The wrong—I speak openly—that we are committing we will endeavor to make good as soon as our military goal has been reached. Anybody who is threatened, as we are threatened and is fighting for his highest possessions, can have only one thought—how he is to hack his way through." (page 33). It is remarkable how anti-German the book already was in 1915, let alone by 1917 after the United States had entered the war.

The book lays it on pretty thick regarding Belgium, claiming that it "suffered as no
nation has in modern times" and that "No other such record of national self-sacrifice is recorded in history", both dubious claims even in late 1914. (p37)

The German army is described as hyper-efficient throughout the work, "No army of all history ever took the field so splendidly
equipped with new and terrible engines of war as the armies of Germany, and particularly the Army of the Meuse in this

This drawing of a "Uhlan patrol surprised by Belgian armored car"
 wasn't good history but it captivated me as a child, and I still find
it fascinating. I was shocked to discover this was somewhat real!
The Belgians were the first to use armored cars in combat when
they converted civilian vehicles into the Minerva Armored Car and
employed them in 1914! 

campaign. Aeroplanes and dirigibles spied out the way, reported the positions of the enemy, the artillery the range. Motor cars carried soldiers swiftly from point to point and hurried light guns into action; heavily armored, they had their place on the line of battle, and marked with the Red Cross they carried the wounded to places of safety. Rapid-fire guns poured out streams of bullets like water from a hose, and were so compactly built that one could be packed on a horse, or carried on two motorcycles. Siege guns with a range of ten miles, of a calibre and weight never before thought capable of passage along country roads, were dragged by traction engines or by their own motors at a rate of eight miles an hour—guns that twenty years ago would have been useless in any field because of their immobility." (p34)

Many images in the chapter seem to have been chosen to represent this ideal of 'modern' war, but they look quaint and old-fashioned to our eyes. The vast majority of the forces on all sides were infantry, most transported remained drawn by horses, and the major difference between this battlefield and those of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 seems to be the vast number of troops involved.

Original Caption: "An Impromptu Registration. Refugees from Antwerp writing their names and addresses on a fence to let their friends know their whereabouts." (p41)

Most of the images in this chapter continue the theme of training and mobilization from Chapter I, and there are a lot of images of men marching (probably one of the easier images for photojournalists of the day to obtain.).

Other images highlight the refugees fleeing the Germn invasion, as well as some images of the defense of Belgium and France.

Descriptions continue of the German actions in Belgium, especially, "War has never been

more remorseless. In every town and village prominent men were seized as hostages and were relentlessly put to death if any citizen, maddened by the destruction of his property or insults offered to his womenkind, dared to attack the aggressors. The story of German atrocities in Belgium is not to be told here." (p42)

"All  that was left from the disaster. This dog cart and its 
contents were all that a once prosperous family saved from 
ruin." (p40) The images of dog carts really shocked me as a kid.
 The idea of dogs as draft animals was so foreign, outside of sleds!

Nonetheless, he includes a lengthy description the German taking of Louvain, Belgium by American writer  Richard Harding Davis, culminating in this chilling description: "Outside the station in the

public square the people of Louvain passed in an unending procession, women bareheaded, weeping, men carrying the children asleep on their shoulders, all hemmed in by the shadowy army of gray wolves. Once they were halted, and among them were marched a line of men. They well knew their fellow townsmen. These were on the way to be shot. And better to point the moral an officer halted

"On the road to safety. The dog is much used as a draught animal in 
Belgium, and many refugees were fortunate enough to get dog carts 
in which to escape." (p48)

both processions and, climbing to a cart, explained why the men were to die. He warned others not
to bring down upon themselves a like vengeance.
               As those being led to spend the night in the fields looked across to those marked for death they saw old friends, neighbors of long standing, men of their own household. The officer bellowing at them from the cart was illuminated by the headlights of an automobile. He looked like an actor held in a spotlight on a darkened stage.

"These are the real dogs of war. The Belgians use them to draw 

batteries  of Lewis guns." (p61) I would love to have this 

as a miniature for World War I Belgian forces!

               It was all like a scene upon the stage, so unreal, so inhuman, you felt it could not be true; that the curtain of fire, purring and crackling and sending up sparks to meet the kind, calm stars, was only a painted backdrop; that the reports of rifles from the dark rooms came from blank cartridges; and that these trembling shopkeepers and peasants ringed in bayonets would not in a few minutes really die, but that they themselves and their homes would be restored to their wives and children." (p46)

"Photograph taken amid bursting shells. This picture was taken under fire. The soldiers in the trenches were Belgians. (p50) I doubt this is truly under fire, as the soldiers all clearly staring at the camera, but it might be just before some action.

The chapter describes the German offensive falling short just outside Paris, but does praise the German commander for the disciplined retreat after the Marne, "In ultimate history it is not improbable that the fame of Von Kluck will rest quite as securely on his successful retreat from the Marne as upon his almost unopposed march upon Pans. The former was by far the more difficult test of his generalship. Caught between the hammer and anvil, outnumbered, with the morale of his army sorely suffering by the sudden transition from enthusiastic advance to precipitate retreat, he yet saved his army from the destruction which for a time seemed imminent."

"Desperate stand of British artillery against odds. During the Battle of Mons a German battery of ten guns surprised 
Battery L, Royal Horse Artillery, and killed most of its horses and men before it could get into action." (p59)
I believe this refers to the Affair of Néry, though it is a rather fanciful description of that fight, which was larger then described.

The chapter ends with a chronology of the period covered, from the start of the German invasion in early August through to French recapture of Rheims on 14 September. I loved these chronologies as a kid, because the chapters and pictures tended to flit about, and it was difficult, even with the maps, to always be clear on what was happening. Chronologies are a map of time, they made it so much easier to follow the tale, and I'm certain their inclusions in this book really inspired my love of chronologies, even today. Indeed, establishing a solid chronology is still one of my first steps when I set out to write a historical work.

All views in this blog are my own and represent the views of no other person, organization, or institution.

Blogging the Nations at War I

Blogging the Nations at War

The Nations at War: A Current History by Willis John Abbot
(New York, Leslie-Judge Co., 1917)

When I was seven years old I discovered a 'history book' that my mother owned,  The Nations at War: A Current History by Willis John Abbot. It wasn't an actual history work, but rather the work of a journalist, Willis Abbot, who wrote many popular history works, much the same way Tom Brokaw or Dan Rather might today. He was an engaging author, and his works were profusely illustrated, especially The Nations at War, which had an interesting mix of photographs, commercial illustrations, and paintings gracing its pages. I wish that the artists had been credited for their work, but I can think of no way to discover who they were today.

I've remained fascinated with this work for decades, because it was the closest thing to a 'primary source' that 7 year old me had yet seen.  Abbot published a revised edition of the work in 1914 (maybe a typo in the catalog?), 1915, 1916, 1917, and 1918, providing a glimpse of the war through American eyes. The change in tone  as the United States shifted from somewhat disinterested observer to eventual combatant was obvious throughout. So, I've decided to 'blog' the book, go through it chapter by chapter and share some of the images and passages that really impacted me as a child, or that I find particularly interesting from a historical or cultural standpoint today.

The book itself is readily available for purchase at many used book sites, and you can also find lots of pdfs on line. I use this pdf of the 1917 edition, which matches the edition I grew up with and which I still have (though I did have it rebound). I found it through the Open Library catalog entry on the Internet Archive site.

So, right off the bat, the cover is striking!  It really emphasizes that this war felt like a continuation of the 19th century to those observing it, not the opening salvo of the 20th century. It was a real mystery to me as a kid, because I could only identify a few of the obvious states indicated, Germany, Japan, Great Britain, ect.  Most of the nations used flags that I just was not familiar with. I can do a little better now.

The design shows the four Central Powers at the bottom, and the Allied Powers along the sides and the top. The Central Powers are arranged in a circle in the center bottom of the design, starting clockwise from the top: Imperial Germany, Bulgaria, The Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire.  The Allied Powers were more difficult, also going clockwise, starting from the bottom left, we have Montenegro, Japan, Russia, Great Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, and Serbia. an eclectic set of choices, since several Allied Powers, like Greece, were left out.  The United States entered the war years after they had designed the covered, of course. :)

One of the few color images in the book,
a striking, and picturesque photograph. Page 29.

The introduction is well written and arresting, it begins "FOR YEARS wise men had said that there could be no general European war..." and goes on to explain how international finance, public opinion, international socialism, and the destructiveness of military weapons all were said to prevent a general war, and that all failed.  "One by one the forces which the world had relied upon to avert the calamity of a general war were swept away. The ties of finance, of commerce, of mutual interest, of common humanity, even of a common religion were broken."  It then goes on to make a strong case for a 'league of nations' to prevent such wars in the future, responding to George Washington's statement that, "It is our policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world" with "the world has changed since Washington's day. The old isolation of the United States is ended. Oceans have become highways instead of barriers. The interests of all nations are inextricably interwoven." It feels like this could have been written in 2016 instead of 1916.

The first chapter covers the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, as well as the diplomacy leading up to the war and the relative strengths of the combatants. There is a distinct anti-German bias throughout the book, "The assassination, Austro-Hungary's offended sovereignty, were but pretexts for the which the ruling powers of Germany were determined to force."

Vividly highlighting the anti-German bias of the book, on pages 16-17 Abbot claims that "Almost had the German Emperor paralleled in this twentieth century the situation created nearly two hundred years earlier by his famous progenitor Frederick the Great" and goes on to repeat a famous passage on Frederick:

"On the head of Frederic is all the blood which was shed in a war which raged during many years and in every quarter of the globe, the blood of the column of Fontenoy, the blood of the mountaineers who were slaughtered at Culloden. The evils produced by his wickedness were felt in lands where the name of Prussia was unknown; and, in order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of North America." (from Thomas B. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays,  Volume 2)

The coverage of the assassination is more accurate then one might have expected, with very little of conspiracy theory, Abbott acknowledges the Serbs did it and explains why. Still, the book pretty firmly places the blame on the Germans, though it acknowledges the impact of competing Russian ambitions. But France and Great Britain both get treated fairly gently.  Britain is praised for defending Belgian neutrality and though the French desire to avenge the Franco-Prussian War and Alsace-Lorraine are mentioned, they get relatively short shrift.

A pair of maps illustrating Abbot's argument that German and Russian ambitions were in direct competition. pp 8-9

 I do not consider myself an expert on the causes of World War I, nor am I comfortable assigning blame beyond that I consider direct and incontrovertible - the Serbian terrorists who assassinated the Archduke certainly were primarily to blame, and they achieved their goal, Yugoslavia. Which puts the lie to that oft repeated shibboleth that 'terrorism has never succeeded' because it certainly has.

This photo is one of the reasons I wanted to join
the Boy Scouts as a kid. p18.

If you are interested in a more modern take on the origins of World War I, there is still a decent amount of debate on the causes, many historians assign more of the blame to Germany but not all of them. Look at Holger Herwig and Richard F. Hamilton in The Origins of World War I (2003) and Christopher M. Clark in (2012) The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (2012) for somewhat contrasting views.  Barbara W. Tuchman's popular history, The Guns of August (1962), argues for bungling and miscommunication leading to the war.

I always felt sorry for the horses. p19

There is a great deal of discussion comparing the strength of the various nations in 1914, but of course it is a journalist's account during the middle of the conflict.  Many of the pictures in this first chapter introduce the royal leaders, Kaiser Willhelm II, Emperor Francis Joseph, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, Czar Nicholas and King George V.  The relative unimportance of these men to decision making during the war is obviously not apparent to the public during the conflict.

Other images really captured my imagination or helped
me get a handle on some of the less glamourous aspects of warfare.  One image, showing British officers drafting horses for the war effort, stuck in my head and always popped to mind as I began to study military history, and thus logistics, seriously in graduate school. So did many images of trains and marshaling yards in the books, and its description of the complicated process of mobilizing mass armies for warfare. The first images highlighting the horrors of war appeared in the first chapter as well.  Not yet photographs, but shocking drawings nonetheless.

I felt even more sorry for the horses after looking at this page. p 23.

I believe that is supposed
to be a Taube. p24.

It had a diagram! p25

Other images grabbed my technical imagination. The Lewis Gun looked like something straight out of Jules Verne, but it was a real, functioning weapon.  The aircraft depicted in this work were even more fantastic looking, even in this first chapter, whether they were the target of a Lewis Gun or just a tail peaking out of a truck transport.

And what kid would not find disappearing gun turrets fascinating?

Pure imagination fuel! p25.

But this last image really highlighted, for me, the oddness of 1914, and so i close out this first Blogging the Nations at War entry with it.  The Belgian infantry and their formation simply look like they are straight out of another time, and not really ready, brave as they might be, to face the storm of steel and fire that the 20th century is sending their way.

Top hats and bayonet swords... my son is trying to get into historical reenacting.
I kind of want to do an impression of Belgian infantry 1914.  There cannot be many who reenact them! p19

All views in this blog are my own and represent the views of no other person, organization, or institution.