David Stevenson on The Unexpected Armistice of 1918 (Video)

Bless the French! They Kept Up Their Production of Naughty Cartoons in Wartime

Laying Siege to a Heart

By Tony Langley

La Vie Parisienne was one of the best-known risqué magazines. Published in Paris, its stood symbol for a high-spirited and slightly hedonistic lifestyle in which women, wine, and having a good time were considered to be of prime importance in life. It made a name for itself by printing numerous drawings and illustrations (no photographs) of lovely looking ladies in all stage of dress and undress. Sometimes, the nicely or scantily dressed girls would be shown expressing anti-German sentiments or performing heroic deeds but almost always with a hint of the erotic. The illustrations were made by artists such as Leonnec and Hérouard, many of whom later became rightly famous for their charming depictions of the female.

Utterly innocent and inoffensive by modern standards, the magazine nevertheless managed to offend the bourgeois sensibilities of many a straight-laced individual, especially those living outside of France. Some American and British military authorities unfavorably mentioned La Vie Parisienne by name as an unhealthy influence upon the manners and mores of the troops.

Publication continued during the war years and the magazine was no doubt eagerly read by soldiers at and behind the front lines, French, British, American, or German for that matter. War-related humor was quite the thing during 1914-18 of course and several collections of cartoons and drawings from La Vie Parisienne were published. This collection of cartoons comes from a volume called l'Amour en Campagne (Love on Campaign). Most of the drawings were simply excuses to show ladies in various romantic or erotic situations. Here we have chosen those with a military theme.

 

Cover for a Collection of 100 Cartoons
from La Vie Parisienne

"It's not only the front line trenches that are dangerous" —
a joke about the hastily built barricades around Paris in August 1914

She wants nothing more to do with things "made in Germany."

Howling at the moon and zeppelins

One of the fruits of war: the hand grenade

 
Everything a good French soldier needs to go on campaign

Source:  From the Tony Langley Collection

Eyewitness: "Burying Pete Walling" by Arthur Guy Empey

 

After remaining in rest billets for eight days, we received the unwelcome tidings that the next morning we would "go in" to "take over." At six in the morning our march started and, after a long march down the dusty road, we again arrived at reserve billets.

I was No. 1 in the leading set of 4's. The man on my left was named "Pete Walling," a cheery sort of fellow. He laughed and joked all the way on the march, buoyed up my drooping spirits. I could not figure out anything attractive in again occupying the front line, but Pete did not seem to mind, said it was all in a lifetime. My left heel was blistered from the rubbing of my heavy marching boot. Pete noticed that I was limping and offered to carry my rifle, but by this time I had learned the ethics of the march in the British Army and courteously refused his offer.

We had gotten half-way through the communication trench, Pete in my immediate rear. He had his hand on my shoulder, as men in a communication trench have to keep in touch with each Other. We had just climbed over a bashed-in part of the trench when in our rear a man tripped over a loose signal wire, and let out an oath. As usual, Pete rushed to his help. To reach the fallen man, he had to cross this bashed-in part. A bullet cracked in the air and I ducked. Then a moan from the rear. My heart stood still. I went back and Pete was lying on the ground; by the aid of my flashlight, I saw that he had his hand pressed to his right breast. The fingers were covered with blood. I flashed the light on his face, and in its glow a grayish-blue color was stealing over his countenance. Pete looked up at me and said:

"Well, Yank, they've done me in. I can feel myself going West." His voice was getting fainter and I had to kneel down to get the words. Then he gave me a message to write home to his mother and his sweetheart, and I, like a great big boob, cried like a baby. I was losing my first friend of the trenches.

Word was passed to the rear for a stretcher. He died before it arrived. Two of us put the body on the stretcher and carried it to the nearest first-aid post, where the doctor took an official record of Pete's name, number, rank, and regiment from his identity disk, this to be used in the Casualty Lists and notification to his family.

We left Pete there, but it broke our hearts to do so. The doctor informed us that we could bury him the next morning. That afternoon, five of the boys of our section, myself included, went to the little ruined village in the rear and from the deserted gardens of the French chateaux gathered grass and flowers. From these we made a wreath.

While the boys were making this wreath, I sat under a shot-scarred apple tree and carved out the following verses on a little wooden shield which we nailed on Pete's cross.

True to Us God; true to Britain,

Doing his duty to the last,

Just one more name to be written

On the Roll of Honor of heroes passed.

Passed to their God, enshrined in glory,

Entering life of eternal rest,

One more chapter in England's story

Of her sons doing their best.

Rest, you soldier, mate so true,

Never forgotten by us below;

Know that we are thinking of you,

Ere to our rest we are bidden to go.

Next morning the whole section went over to say good-bye to Pete, and laid him away to rest.

After each one had a look at the face of the dead, a Corporal of the R. A. M. C. sewed up the remains in a blanket. Then placing two heavy ropes across the stretcher (to be used in lowering the body into the grave), we lifted Pete onto the stretcher, and reverently covered him with a large Union Jack, the flag he had died for.

The Chaplain led the way, then came the officers of the section, followed by two of the men carrying a wreath. Immediately after came poor Pete on the flag-draped stretcher, carried by four soldiers. I was one of the four. Behind the stretcher, in fours, came the remainder of the section.

To get to the cemetery, we had to pass through the little shell-destroyed village, where troops were hurrying to and fro.

As the funeral procession passed, these troops came to the "attention," and smartly saluted the dead.

Poor Pete was receiving the only salute a Private is entitled to "somewhere in France."

Now and again a shell from the German lines would go whistling over the village to burst in our artillery lines in the rear.

British Field Burial Service (Getty Images)

When we reached the cemetery, we halted in front of an open grave, and laid the stretcher beside it. Forming a hollow square around the opening of the grave, the Chaplain read the burial service.

German machine-gun bullets were "cracking" in the air above us, but Pete didn't mind, and neither did we.

When the body was lowered into the grave, the flag having been removed, we clicked our heels together, and came to the salute.

I left before the grave was filled in. I could not bear to see the dirt thrown on the blanket-covered face of my comrade. On the Western Front there are no coffins, and you are lucky to get a blanket to protect you from the wet and the worms. Several of the section stayed and decorated the grave with white stones.

That night, in the light of a lonely candle in the machine gunner's dugout of the front-line trench, I wrote two letters. One to Pete's mother, the other to his sweetheart. While doing this I cursed the Prussian war-god with all my heart, and I think that St. Peter noted same.

The machine gunners in the dugout were laughing and joking. To them, Pete was unknown. Pretty soon, in the warmth of their merriment, my blues disappeared. One soon forgets on the Western Front.

Arthur Guy Empey (1883–1963) was an American soldier, author, actor, and screenwriter best known for his 1917 bestselling book Over the Top from which this account is an excerpt. As a volunteer in the British Army, he documented his rather brief, but harrowing experiences in WWI trenches, becoming a famous war hero, cheerleader for Liberty Bonds, and pioneer in early war films.

Imagine This: Amy Lowell Imagined Peace, and It Came True

Amy Lowell, 1874–1925

American imagist poet Amy Lowell described the surreal experience of living an ordinary day in an extraordinary time.

September, 1918

This afternoon was the colour of water falling through sunlight;

The trees glittered with the tumbling of leaves;

The sidewalks shone like alleys of dropped maple leaves,

And the houses ran along them laughing out of square, open windows.

Under a tree in the park,

Two little boys, lying flat on their faces,

Were carefully gathering red berries

To put in a pasteboard box.

Some day there will be no war,

Then I shall take out this afternoon

And turn it in my fingers,

And remark the sweet taste of it upon my palate,

And note the crisp variety of its flights of leaves.

To-day I can only gather it

And put it into my lunch-box,

For I have time for nothing

But the endeavour to balance myself

Upon a broken world.

            —Amy Lowell

About the same time, Lowell explained how the war had left her feeling unmoored: "The war has shaken us out of an eddy into the main stream of the centuries, and has given me the sensation of swirling along on a rapidly moving current, passing woods and water-plants and shores almost too fast to glimpse them, realizing as I pass that many other shingles like me have rushed down this same river, rushed toward something which I cannot now see."

Some Doughboy Beneficiaries of Lowell's Efforts

Lowell resisted the tumult with poetry, convinced that it had the power to comfort, inspire, and change the world. She invested her energies in convincing the American public of the value of contemporary poetry. Learning that American Army training camps were requesting books for their libraries, Lowell arranged to supply poetry books to 34 military bases across the United States, and she also donated funds to supply books to military hospitals. As scholar Nina Sankovitch notes, “by the summer of 1918, Amy Lowell had placed poetry in the hands of just about any United States soldier asking for it."

From Connie Ruzich's Terrific WWI Poetry Blog Behind Their Lines

Learning by Fighting: The AEF Experience

Editor's Introduction:  Thanks to our contributor this month, historian Jeffrey LaMonica, we will see that Pershing's forces were needed on the battlefield earlier than anticipated and had no choice but to learn as they were fighting. This process involved making many mistakes, digesting them, and developing new doctrines and tactics on the fly. In this issue, our contributor analyzes the learning curve of the AEF, using a case-study approach with the 5th Division of the First Army, a formation that did not arrive in France until May 1918, had absolutely minimal formal training, and yet on 11 November 1918 found itself in the most advanced position of all the U.S. forces. MH

By Jeffrey LaMonica

Introduction

Most historical treatments of the AEF published before the 1980s do not acknowledge its tactical development. They provide sweeping assessments of American battlefield performance and draw broad conclusions concerning the U.S. Army's general contribution to the defeat of Imperial Germany. More recent scholarship, however, provides a deeper understanding of the United States' impact on the Great War by evaluating all facets of the AEF. The majority of these works dismiss the AEF as tactically stagnant and inept. A few scholars delve deeper into the evidence to reveal and more fairly assess AEF tactical growth, such as Mark E. Grotelueschen's The AEF Way of War: The American Army and Combat in the First World War. This article strives to fit in with this trend by exploring the AEF's aptitude in two specific tactical areas, open warfare—the use of fire and maneuver, championed by General  Pershing from the birth of the AEF—and combined-arms warfare—the coordinated use of infantry and its weapons, artillery, vehicles, aircraft, communications, and logistics—by demonstrating how they were learned and applied by the 5th Division, one of America's most active divisions of the Great War. 

The AEF came to appreciate these techniques by late 1918 but was not able to execute them with greater success. Ultimately, its formal training failed to prepare the AEF for modern industrialized warfare. Survival instinct and combat experience, however, fostered enough tactical learning to enable American divisions to keep gaining ground until the Armistice. The U.S. Army would revisit and build upon the AEF's experimentation with combined arms and open warfare during the interwar period and the Second World War. Furthermore, the AEF's brand of learning by fighting continued to be the Army's method for tactical growth from 1941 to 1945 and still persists in the 21st century.

Pershing's initial open-warfare vision stemmed from his determination to restore mobility to the Western Front and his confidence in the skill and fighting spirit of American officers and enlisted men. He believed open warfare relied on expert marksmen to provide effective suppressing fire and individual bravery to flank the enemy and close with the bayonet. The commander-in-chief's brand of open warfare represented a combination of traditional tactical principles, such as offensive spirit and hand-to-hand combat, and new trends in battlefield survival, such as infiltration and flanking maneuvers. Pershing's tactical ideas, however, contained flaws. Other belligerents learned earlier in the war that élan and the bayonet counted for little on the modern industrialized battlefield. Although the Japanese launched successful bayonet charges as recently as the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, the volume of machine guns and artillery on the Western Front in 1914 made it virtually impossible to get close enough to engage the enemy with cold steel. Furthermore, the most effective open-warfare tactics relied on support from advanced weapons, motor vehicles, and aircraft. 

The AEF also proved slow to mix open-warfare infantry tactics with advanced weapons and other arms. The fact that a clear definition of Pershing's open-warfare concept was not published until the fall of 1918 was highly problematic. Despite issuing 54,968 copies of Pershing's Combat Instructions to the AEF before the end of the war, there were not enough weeks left before the Armistice to afford time to learn and implement these new tactics. The fact that Pershing's open-warfare concept remained nebulous until September 1918 had the hidden benefit of allowing AEF divisions several months of combat to improvise, experiment, and engage in the experiential learning typical of the U.S. Army's history. AEF officers and enlisted men devised their own tactical innovations to survive on the Western Front. The resulting incarnations of open warfare and combined arms often proved more effective than those published by the commander-in-chief and the U.S. War Department.

The strategic planning and combat decisions of AEF commanders during the last phase of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive indicated that combined arms and open warfare had permeated the AEF's collective mindset primarily through battlefield experience, not published doctrine or training. 

Divisional Observation Post in the Vosges Sector

The 5th Division's Experience

Although the 5th Division spent the prescribed six months in a stateside training facility, its piecemeal assembly at Fort Logan and fragmented shipment to Europe led to discrepancies in the amount and type of instruction received across the division. Major General John E. McMahon took command of the division in January 1918. 

After arriving in France, the division's infantry brigade began Pershing's three-month training regimen in April 1918 at AEF Training Area Thirteen near Bar-sur-Aube, France. Officers of the advance training detachment rejoined their units as instructors at this time. For approximately one month, the men learned basic trench warfare tactics, such as defensive chemical warfare techniques and trench raiding. The 5th Field Artillery Brigade remained at Le Valdahon for its instruction. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth machine-gun battalions trained around Bar-sur-Aube but did so separately from the infantry. Training divisional elements separately from one another was typical of all U.S. Army divisions during the Great War and greatly detracted from their ability to conduct cohesive combined-arms tactics in combat. For example, American machine-gun crews never provided fire support for live infantrymen during their training exercises.

The first phase of the 5th Division's training in France ended on 31 May, when General Pershing ordered the division to a “quiet” zone on the Western Front near the town of Epinal in the Toul Sector. The Vosges Mountains stretched across much of this area and inhibited large-scale military activity. This sector of the front saw only occasional patrols, raids, and minor exchanges of artillery fire.

The division's Ninth and Tenth infantry brigades joined with two divisions of the XXXIII Corps of the French Seventh Army for this phase of instruction. French officers taught American enlisted men trench construction, defense against poison gas, patrolling, and raiding. These raiding exercises represented the division's first opportunity to handle live grenades. In keeping with General Pershing's emphasis on marksmanship, the 5th Division's brigade commanders insisted that the French training officers include target practice in their trench warfare regimen. The Official History of the 5th Division USA recounted, “The Americans still clung to the idea that the rifle was the main dependence in warfare, and pushed training with that arm to the utmost.” 

5th Division 155mm Howitzer

The third and final stage of the 5th Division's training barely resembled the month of open-warfare instruction General Pershing intended. Instead, the division occupied its own position on the Western Front in the Saint Die Sector near Lorraine on 19 July. Its first independent action took place at 4:00 a.m. on 17 August near Frapelle. After a ten-minute preliminary bombardment, the Third Battalion of the Sixth Regiment from Brigadier General Walter H. Gordon's Tenth Infantry Brigade successfully advanced into the Fave River Valley and captured the town of Frapelle.

Surprisingly, this short operation included some successful combined arms. The infantry moved forward behind an effective creeping barrage provided by batteries from Brigadier General Clement A. Flagler's 5th Field Artillery Brigade. A major in the Sixth Infantry Regiment by this time, described the infantry assault as “strongly supported by artillery, mortars, machine guns and American aviation.” The demands of the modern industrialized battlefield, survival instinct, and experiential learning were already forcing the 5th Division to employ advanced tactics beyond the scope of their formal training. This month spent in the Saint Die Sector cost the 5th Division about 600 casualties.

With its formal training completed, the 5th Division participated in the Saint Mihiel Offensive on 12 September. It was here where the division began tactical learning through combat experience and battlefield survival. General McMahon had several combined-arms components at his disposal during the offensive, including 63 tanks, the Twelfth Aero Squadron, the Second Balloon Company, and  several units from the First Gas Regiment. After a four-hour preliminary bombardment, the Sixth and Eleventh infantry regiments of the Tenth Brigade attacked at 5:00 a.m. under a creeping barrage. First Sergeant Clyde Heldreth of D Company of the Sixtieth Infantry Regiment noted the effectiveness of this creeping barrage: “At 5:00 o'clock came the command `over the top.' The artillery bombardment then changed to a rolling barrage. Our artillery shelling had accomplished the desired results and the enemy was in full retreat.”  This marked the style of operations that the 5th Division would implement, with continuing success in the final and largest offensive of the war for the AEF, the Meuse-Argonne.

The 5th Division Marker at Remoiville on the Meuse Heights
Marks the Farthest Advance of the AEF

Summing Up:

Consistent with the majority of AEF divisions, formal training did little to prepare the soldiers of the 5th Division to conduct combined arms and open warfare in combat. All phases of the “Red Diamond” Division's instruction were rushed, and there were few weapons available for training purposes. Furthermore, the division's various combat arms trained in different locations around France. Based upon the 5th Division's performance during the final phase of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, it was six months of combat experience and survival on the Western Front that allowed it, and the rest of First Army, to conduct combined arms and open warfare to the point of achieving a successful breakthrough of the German Kriemhilde Line. Deficiencies in the areas of supply, logistics, and communications prevented the AEF from exploiting this breach to the point of annihilating the Imperial German Army. These underdeveloped support systems forced First Army and its 5th Division to pause and refit before crossing into Germany. This respite might have allowed the Imperial German Army to establish a strong line of defense along the Rhine River and drag the conflict into 1919.

According to Colonel Lanza, First Army's Chief of Artillery Operations: “The Armistice put an end to what would have been a long wait, possibly extending through the winter into the following spring. In other words, the Allies managed to give the enemy the final blow just before it would have been necessary to stop the offensive to reorganize and reequip.

After the Armistice, the U.S. Army continued to develop the tactical lessons learned by the American Expeditionary Forces on the Western Front. Combined arms and General Pershing's open-warfare concept were persistent themes in army doctrine through the 1920s. Supporting the infantry with close artillery and machine gun fire were standard practice. The Army continued working to define and expand combined arms roles for tanks and aircraft. American military thinkers carried on the conversation over trench warfare versus open-warfare tactics.

5th Division Crossing the Meuse River, 5 November 1918

By the 1930s, however, diplomatic isolationism and the budgetary limitations of the Great Depression interrupted the Army's tactical growth. Under these restraints, U.S. Army weapons and equipment became antiquated and costly large-scale training maneuvers were nonexistent. The lack of funding for either improved weapons or training gradually led to a state of under-preparedness in everything but thought. Combat experience was, once again, the Army's primary method of learning to survive and succeed in battle during the Second World War. The U.S. Army of 1941 was not unlike the AEF in 1917 in this regard. Its greatest advantage resided in the leadership of veteran commanders, who had fought in the earlier war, and possessed the wisdom of the Great War's tactical learning curve. 

This article is excerpted  from American Tactical Advancement in World War I: The New Lessons of Combined Arms and Open Warfare by Jeffrey LaMonica.

Available HERE

 

Instant Death Aboard HMS Defence

HMS Defence

HMS Defence was a Minotaur-class armored cruiser built for the Royal Navy in the first decade of the 20th century, the last armored cruiser built for the Royal Navy. The ship was 519 feet long, with a main armament of four 9.2 inch guns. She was stationed in the Mediterranean when the First World War began and participated in the pursuit of the German battlecruiser SMS Goeben and light cruiser SMS Breslau. The ship was transferred to the Grand Fleet in January 1915 and remained there for the rest of her career.

View of Defence's Stern Main Battery

Defence was sunk on 31 May 1916 during the Battle of Jutland, the largest naval battle of the war. Escorting the main body of the Grand Fleet, the ship was fired upon by one German battlecruiser and four dreadnoughts as she attempted to engage the disabled German light cruiser Wiesbaden. She was sunk by gunfire of German battleship Friedrich der Grosse that detonated her rear magazine. The fire from that explosion spread to the ship's secondary magazines, which exploded in turn. Capt Raymond Poland, a turret commander on battleship HMS Warspite, was impressed by the “very gallant show” Defence  made. His delight instantly turned to horror as she was hit by three German salvoes in quick succession and the cruiser seemingly disintegrated, her crushed bow sticking out of the North Sea at a 60-degree angle before sinking. “I nearly vomited,” Poland wrote to his brother. “God it was an awful sight.”

Computerized 3-D Image of the Wreck of HMS Defence

At the time, it was believed that Defence  had been reduced to fragments by the explosion, but the wreck was discovered in mid-1984 by Clive Cussler and a NUMA survey of the North Sea. It was dived upon in 2001 by a team led by nautical archaeologist Innes McCartney and found to be largely intact, despite the violence of her sinking. Defence , along with the other Jutland wrecks, was belatedly declared a protected place under the Protection of Military Remains Act 1986, to discourage further damage to the resting place of approximately 900 men. 

Sources: Royal Navy News, Wikipedia, Wexford.GreatWar, International Journal of Naval Archeology

Käthe Kollwitz—Graphic Artist of War, Revolution, and Human Suffering

Käthe Kollwitz, Self-portrait toward left, 1901

Woman with Dead Child, 1903

German artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) is probably best known to our readers as a sculptor because of two notable pieces inspired by the death of her soldier son, Peter, Grieving Parents now located at the Vladslo German Cemetery in Flanders, and  Mother with Her Dead Son, 1937, which sits on Unter den Linden in Berlin. Although she was trained as painter and sculptor, Kollwitz turned exclusively to print making in the early 1890s. She would create 275 prints and posters during her career, many of them of a political character. 

Help Russia, 1921

Vienna is dying! Save its Children!, 1920

Early in her career, she became committed to improving the plight of the working class, women, and children. This was likely based on her family’s left-wing values and her experiences with the poor workers who were patients in her husband’s medical practice.  Some of her postwar work also reflects strong sympathy with the civilian populations of the belligerent nations.

In Memoriam, Karl Liebknecht, 1920

Never Again War, 1924

Strongly antiwar, she seems to have become increasingly radicalized during the revolution of 1919 and the unstable 1920s. By 1932, Kollwitz was celebrating the rise of communism.  This, of course, put her on a collision course with the rising Nazis. She was included in the catalog of "Degenerate Art," and much of her work was confiscated or what is now called "shadow banned." She lost a grandson (also named Peter) during the war and passed away just 16 days before its end. Her burial plot is in Berlin's Friedrichsfelde Cemetery.

Down with the [anti] Abortion Articles, 1923

Solidarity, 1931–1932

This work includes 83 of Kollwitz's  graphic works with extensive background on her life.  

Order HERE

The Great War's Last Successful Cavalry Charge: The Jodhpur Lancers at Haifa, 23 September 1918

 

The Jodhpur Lancers

By James Patton

During the First World War cavalry became largely irrelevant. Quick-firing artillery, machine guns and  even repeating rifles, plus the battlefield obstacles of trench systems, could make traditional mounted attacks disastrous failures. Notwithstanding, in September 1918 the Jodhpur Lancers, an elite cavalry regiment from an Indian "Princely State," captured Haifa in a classic cavalry charge.

Pratap Singh (1845–1922) was born in October 1845, the third son of Maharaja Takhat Singh (1819–73), the ruler of  Marwar, which is located in the area of northwestern India called Rajahstan. In his youth,  Pratap learned to ride and shoot, and was commissioned in the Jodhpur Rissala (armed force). Subsequently, he was seconded to the British Indian Army to fight in the Second Afghan War (1878–80), where he was Mentioned in Dispatches for his service. 

Pratap Singh, 1914

Returning home, Pratap served as Chief Minister of Jodhpur, first under his father, then under his older brother Jaswant Singh (1838–95). Pratap was the Regent for his young nephew Sardar Singh (1880-1911) from 1895 to 1898, then again for his grandnephew  Sumar Singh (1911–1918) and then for another grandnephew Umaid Singh (1918–1922). Once a soldier, always a soldier, so he formed an elite cavalry unit that would rival those professional Indian Army units that he had served with in Afghanistan. Of course, the state already had the Rissala, but it was poorly led, ill-disciplined and barely trained, so Pratap decided to build a new regiment of lancers in the city of Jodhpur. 

With royal consent, he provided horses, weapons, and uniforms for sixty men, and was appointed  Lieutenant-Colonel of Cavalry. Soon thereafter, in 1889 the British Viceregal government requested that each Princely State contribute military units for Imperial Service in actions outside of India.

So Pratap’s small force became a regiment of 300 mounted men, which he named the Sardar Rissala after his nephew, then the heir to the throne. In the Imperial Order of Battle the regiment was called  "The Jodhpur Lancers."

During the late 19th century, the Jodhpur Lancers became one of the most glamorous of the state formations. Their motto was Jo Hokum (“As you command”) and the support of the Maharaja ensured that the unit was smartly disciplined and always superbly uniformed, equipped and mounted.

The Lancers Dismounting in the Field

In particular, the regiment’s polo team was very successful, and even traveled to the United Kingdom to participate in competitions. These occasions gave Pratap the chance to mingle with some of the highest ranking officers in the British Indian Army.  He also hosted members of the British Royal Family, including the future George V, upon their visits to Jodhpur, as it is one of the most scenic cities in the country.

Although the Lancers were involved in occasional skirmishes with rebellious tribes on the Northwest Frontier (bordering on today’s Afghanistan), what Pratap really wanted was to lead his men into action on behalf of the Queen and Empress. In 1900 he got his chance—his Jodhpur Lancers were sent to China to serve as part of the multi-national force that gathered to quell the Boxer Rebellion.

This was a war of sieges, not cavalry charges, and although the Lancers saw relatively little combat, they performed well. As a result, in 1901 Pratap was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB), later upgraded to the GCB, and in 1902 he was appointed an (honorary) Major-General in the  Indian Army. 

Officers of the Jodhpur Lancers

When the First World War began in 1914, Sir Pratap immediately offered to take his Jodhpur Lancers to France, where he hoped to be able to fight the Germans. Although the circumstances there didn’t favor cavalry charges, he reportedly vowed, “I will make an opportunity!”

Thus the Jodhpur Lancers arrived in Flanders in October 1914 and remained on the Western Front for over three years, as Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig stubbornly maintained a cavalry corps that he believed he would need when he achieved the ultimate breakthrough. During this interlude, Sir Pratap was promoted to (honorary) Lieutenant-General in the Indian Army in 1916. The Lancers were finally deployed at the Battle of Cambrai, where they were to follow the tanks, but the tanks were too slow and hard to avoid. Most of the time the Lancers were held in reserve, and Sir Pratap spent a lot of time in London, even working with the Imperial War Cabinet in 1917–18. 

In May of 1918 the Lancers were posted to the 15th Imperial Service Cavalry Brigade in Egypt, which consisted solely of Princely State regiments. This brigade was then forwarded on to Palestine, where British and ANZAC forces were fighting the Ottomans. Here the mounted troops were playing a very large role.

By this time, Sir Pratap was 73 years old and he was urged to slow down. During September 1918, the Lancers were constantly in action, covering more than 500 miles in 30 days. At one point, he spent over 30 hours in the saddle. Before they got to Haifa, Sir Pratap was feverish, so he reluctantly turned  the command over to Major Dalpat Singh Shekhawat, MC (1892–1918).

Major Singh Would Command the Lancers in the Battle
and Be Killed in the Action

On 23 September 1918, the Brigade was ordered to take the strategically important and heavily defended port city of Haifa. Ottoman troops had taken up positions in front of the town and were supported by German advisors and Austro-Hungarian artillery on the hills above.

The battle plan was as follows: a detachment from the Mysore Lancers were to seize the artillery positions, and the Jodhpur Lancers were to storm the city itself. Accordingly, four hundred Lancers drew themselves up in their battle lines east of the city, 4,000 yards from the enemy. They faced almost a thousand dug-in Ottomans, behind barbed wire and covered by at least four machine guns.

Detail of the Jodhpur's Area of Operation

The Lancers advanced at the trot towards the Ottomans, crossing the Acre railway line, where they came into machine gun and artillery range. The B squadron of the Lancers, which solely consisted of Rathores (a Rajput warrior caste) were tasked with taking out the Ottoman machine guns. Obstructed by quicksand on the bank of the Kishon River, the Lancers were forced to wheel to the left towards the lower slope of Mount Carmel. Orders given to the 13th Brigade (one Yeomanry and two Indian Army battalions) and the rest of the 15th  Brigade were to deliver suppressive gunfire while the Jodhpur Lancers were charging. Ignoring constant but poorly aimed artillery fire, the Lancers accelerated to a canter until, as they passed through a narrow valley close to the entrenchments, they reached the ‘break-in point’, where they  accelerated to the gallop. Almost at once, Major Singh Shekhawat fell, mortally wounded by random gun fire, and Captain Aman Singh Jodha (1870–1950) took over.

The Lancers didn’t stop at reducing the defenses. To the Ottoman’s surprise, the Lancers swarmed into the city itself. Historian Charles C. Trench has written: ‘the jo hukums (sic) had to be restrained as they galloped through the streets of Haifa, even after all the machine gun posts had fallen… spearing and butchering unfortunate Turks who crossed their path, civilians even, for the Rathores were crazed with rage’. A German officer reportedly said: ‘We tried to cover the Turks' retreat, but we expected them to do something, if only keep their heads. At last we decided they were not worth fighting for.’

The Jodhpur Lancers Entering Haifa

The Mysore Lancers, who had been dismounted in order to scramble up the slope of Mount Carmel to engage the Austrian gunners, were remounted and followed the Jodhpurs into the town. Together the two regiments captured 1,350 German, Austrian  and Ottoman prisoners, including two German officers and 35 Ottoman officers. They captured  four 4.2-inch guns, eight 77mm guns , four camel guns and a 6-inch naval gun, plus 11 machine guns. Total  15th Brigade casualties amounted to eight dead and 34 wounded. Sixty horses were killed and 83 were injured. 

After more than 400 years of Ottoman rule, Haifa was now under British control. In the 1919 official history of the British campaign in Palestine, it was said of the charge of the Jodhpur Lancers that “No more remarkable cavalry action of its scale was fought in the whole course of the campaign.” Strong praise, for the campaign especially so, alongside the incredible ANZAC light horse attack at Beersheba. The charge at Haifa proved to be the last large-scale cavalry action ever undertaken by British arms  in wartime. 

The Jodhpur Lancers were once again called upon to fight for the British in the Second World War, but  they had to swap their horses for Bren gun carriers. Following the 1947 reorganization of the military and the takeover of all of the Princely States by the government of  Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), in 1953 all of the State Forces were disbanded and the heritage of the Jodhpur Lancers became a part of the Indian Army’s 61st Cavalry  Regiment, which today includes the world’s only operational horse-mounted cavalry unit. The all-Rathore tradition of the Lancer’s B Squadron has been maintained as well.

Regimental Badge of the Jodhpur Lancers

In 1919 Sir Pratap returned to Jodhpur, where he resumed doing royal duties. At his death in 1922, his full title had become Lieutenant-General His Highness Maharajadhiraja Maharaja Shri Sir Pratap Singh Sahib Bahadur, GCB, GCSI, GCVO. Perhaps his memory is best served by the eulogy delivered by Indian Army Brig. Gen. C.R. Harbord CB CMG DSO (1873–1958), a personal friend and the Commander of the Imperial Service Cavalry Brigade in Palestine:

“I have always looked upon him as the finest Indian I have ever had the honor to know–loyal to the core, a sportsman to his finger-tips, a gallant soldier and a real gentleman.” Sounds classically British.

Sources: 

Steve McGregor at War History On Line, "The Last Great Cavalry Charge of WW1: The Jodhpur Lancers"  

Brigadier M.S. Jodha at Fair Observer, "The Story of the Jodhpur Lancers: 1885–1952"    

Richard Head and Tony McClenaghan, The Maharajas Paltans : A History of the Indian State Forces 1888-1948 (2 Vols-Set), Manohar 2013: New Delhi. (Anthony Norman “Tony” McClenaghan was a colleague and friend of mine for many years, during his long service as the General Secretary of The Indian Military Historical Society. JP)

Surprising Things I Found When I Finally Read Wells' The War That Will End War

I just got around to reading this famous work and I found myself surprised by a number of the passages.  MH, Editor/Publisher

H.G. Wells Was Among the 53 British Authors Who Supported
the War in a September 1914 Letter

You keep using that [title]. I do not think it means what 

you think it means.

Paraphrasing Inigo Montoya

1.  Despite His Well-Known Early Support for the War, the 1914 Version of Wells Is Startlingly Blood Thirsty

This Prussian Imperialism has been for forty years an intolerable nuisance in the earth. Ever since the crushing of the French in 1871 the evil thing has grown and cast its spreading shadow over Europe.

So that the harvest of this darkness comes now almost as a relief, and it is a grim satisfaction in our discomforts that we can at last look across the roar and torment of battlefields to the possibility of an organized peace. For this is now a war for peace.

To those who love peace there can be no other hope in the present conflict than the defeat, the utter discrediting of the German legend, the ending for good and all of the blood and iron superstition, of Krupp, flag-wagging Teutonic Kiplingism, and all that criminal, sham efficiency that centers in Berlin.  Never was war so righteous as war against Germany now. Never has any State in the world so clamored for punishment.

I find myself enthusiastic for this war against Prussian militarism. [33]

2.  "Taking the Profit Out of War":  A Strategy for Bringing Socialism?

Do Liberals realize that the individualist capitalist system is helpless now? It may be picked up unresistingly. It is stunned. A new economic order may be improvised and probably will in some manner be improvised in the next two or three years. 

There is no going back now to peace; our men must die, in heaps, in thousands; we cannot delude ourselves with dreams of easy victories; we must all suffer endless miseries and  anxieties; scarcely a human affair is there that will not be marred and darkened by this war. Out of it all must come one universal resolve: that this iniquity must be plucked out by the roots. Whatever follies still lie ahead for mankind this folly at least must end. There must be no more buying and selling of guns and warships and war-machines. There must be no more gain in arms. Kings and Kaisers must cease to be the commercial travelers of monstrous armament concerns.

Let me set out the suggestion very plainly. All the plant for the making of war material throughout the world must be taken over by the Government of the State in which it exists; every gun factory, every rifle factory, every dockyard for the building of warships. [45]

Wells Later in the War

3.  Let's Reshape Europe!

Do Liberals realize that now is the time to plan the confederation and collective disarmament of Europe, now is the time to re-draw the map of Europe so that there may be no more rankling sores or unsatisfied national ambitions? [67]

When the Prussians invaded Luxemburg they tore up the map of Europe. To the redrawing of that map a thousand complex forces will come. . .That means that we have to re-draw the map so that there shall be, for just as far as we can see ahead, as little cause for warfare among us Western nations as possible. That means that we have to redraw it justly. And very extensively. [For example] I suggest that France must recover Lorraine, and that Luxemburg must be linked in closer union with Belgium. Alsace, it seems to me, should be given a choice between France and an entry into the Swiss Confederation. It would possibly choose France. Denmark should have again the distinctly Danish part of her lost provinces restored to her. Trieste and Trent, and perhaps also Pola, should be restored to Italy. . . The break-up of the Austrian Empire has hung over Europe like a curse for forty years. Let us break it up now and have done with it. What is to become of the non-German regions of Austria-Hungary? And what is to happen upon the Polish frontier of Russia? [56]

4.  A Silver Lining—An Opportunity for the Intelligensia?

The character of the new age that must come out of the catastrophes of this epoch will be no mechanical consequence of inanimate forces. Will and ideas will take a larger part in this swirl-ahead than they have even taken in any previous collapse. . . The common man and base men are scared to docility. Rulers, pomposities, obstructives are suddenly apologetic, helpful, asking for help. This is a time of incalculable plasticity. For the men who know what they want, the moment has come. It is the supreme opportunity, the test or condemnation of constructive liberal thought in the world. [66]

5.  An Odd Appeal to the American People

This appeal comes to you from England at war, and it is addressed to you because upon your nation rests the issue of this conflict. The influence of your States upon its nature and duration must needs be enormous, and at its ending you may play a part such as no nation has ever played since the world began.

For it rests with you to establish and secure or to refuse to establish and secure the permanent peace of the world, the final ending of war.

We do not ask you for military help. Keep the peace which it is your unparalleled good fortune to enjoy so securely. But keep it fairly. Remember that we fight now for national existence, and that in the night, even as this is written, within a hundred miles or so of this place, the dark ships [?] feel their way among the floating mines with which the Germans have strewn the North Sea, [81]

6.  Where Are Those Christians?

We look to the Church that takes for its purposes the name of the Prince of Peace. In England, except for the smallest, meekest protest against war, any sort of war, on the part of a handful of Quakers, Christianity is silent. Its universally present organization speaks no coherent counsels. Its workers for the most part are buried in the loyal manufacture of flannel garments and an inordinate quantity of bed-socks for the wounded. [104]

Over the years, we have presented several other articles examining Wells' prophesies, commentary and reflections on the World War.  See our articles examining those ideas HERE

Source: Except for some minor merging of different sections covering similar ideas, the material above is all from the original version of The War That Will End War, which can be found for free on Project Gutenberg.