The Bulgarian Contract–Did the War Actually End in Macedonia?

History Sleuth and Real Life Detective Graeme Sheppard

By James Patton

Graeme Sheppard is a retired investigator with the London Metropolitan Police who has taken up historical research. In 2021 he produced an engaging account of how a clever piece of misinformation arguably could have precipitated events that ended the First World War. 

His premise is that there was a commonly held belief amongst ordinary Bulgarians that their agreement with Germany was for a three-year war and that ending date came on 10 September 1918. Thus, he argues that this canard caused the collapse of the Bulgarian army, which in turn led to the German High Command recommending that an armistice be sought. 

While researching in the UK National Archives in Kew about an entirely different matter regarding China in the 1930s, Sheppard  came across a 1931 Foreign Office file  archived as Miscellaneous. It contained a memoir of a junior diplomat named D.J. Cowan explaining how he had witnessed something of great significance.

Lieutenants Howe and Cowan

“The story [among Bulgarian folk]” he wrote, “was a very short and simple one. It was this: our contract with the Germans is for three years only [a mistaken belief that was based upon pure propaganda] … [and] that the men at the front definitely did not intend to carry on after the three-year limit had been reached ... from what I saw of the troops of the neighborhood where I was there seemed little doubt of the fact that they had simply left the front with the one object of returning home.”

Cowan went on to describe how this mass Bulgarian desertion in September 1918 coincided with the Allies’ great offensive.  

In fact, there was no such clause, even a  secret one, in Bulgaria’s agreement with the Central Powers. It was likely one of several schemes to undermine the ruling government, hatched by the banned opposition party, the Agrarian Union. Its leader, Alexander Stamboliyski (1879–1923), was imprisoned at the time due to his antiwar posture. 

Alexander Stamboliyski 

Sheppard found much more information in the memoirs and letters of Cowan and Robert Howe, two British second lieutenants whose letters to home and other documents have been carefully preserved by relatives. Although they had starkly dissimilar backgrounds, Howe described the bond between himself and Cowan as closer than brothers. 

Cowan was the only child in his well-to-do family, who lived on Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, an area now occupied by University College London. His father was a civil engineer, and the couple were artistic free-thinkers, who even took young David along on their foreign excursions. In 1914 he was a medical student at St Barts Hospital, near Lincoln’s Inn Fields, about a mile from his home.

Howe was one of five born in Derby to a semi-literate railway worker. The family lived in a cramped terrace house with a privy. Howe’s path out of poverty was through a series of grants from the local council that even enabled him to study mathematics at Cambridge. 

In August 1914, both men left their colleges and volunteered for Lord Kitchener’s New Army.  Cowan was commissioned  in an Irish unit, the 5th (Service) Connaught Rangers and Howe likewise in his local 9th (Service) Notts and Derby (Sherwood Foresters).

After some training, in July 1915 both battalions were sent to Gallipoli, among the first New Army units to go overseas. Once there, both Cowan and Howe were re-assigned to back-fill losses in the 6th Royal Dublin Fusiliers, 30th Brigade, 10th (Irish) Division, which then became the first unit sent to the Macedonian front. 

In the mountains near Kosturino, Howe was defending an exposed ridge overlooking a strategically vital track. Pinned down by machine gun fire, he was shot through the chest and left for dead. After two days, enemy stretcher-bearers found him and loaded him into a bullock cart. At a makeshift field hospital, he was bedded down in a sheep-pen. Remarkably, he survived. Cowan had also been wounded and taken prisoner a day earlier than Howe. 

They were both sent to a new prison camp near ancient Philippopolis (now called Plovdiv). There were no fences there–the Bulgarians couldn’t believe that anyone would want to go back to the fighting. 

Not so with Cowan and Howe. As soon as they were fully recovered, they began to plan their escape. Sneaking out of the camp after dark was easy; hiking more than 100 miles to the Allied lines would not be easy.

On their first escape attempt, they walked south—crossing a mountain range, equipped with only a cheap compass, but were cornered by mastiff dogs only a few miles short of the front. Their boots had been ruined; nevertheless, they were sent barefoot back to Philippopolis.

Their second try saw them head east, following the Maritsa River valley to the Aegean Sea. Cowan believed that he had arranged a rendezvous with the Royal Navy, having sent a cryptic letter outlining the plan to a former colleague now at the Admiralty. Whether this scheme was well laid or not would never be known because, while resting during the day, they were flushed out by armed locals seeking the bounty. 

British Prisoners Putting on a Show at Philippopolis Camp

According to Howe, the prison commandant could never understand why they were escaping. At one point he asked them: “Were you not happy and comfortable here?” The camp conditions were far from posh, but the British officers received by far the best treatment of any there. 

Howe explained that “The Bulgarians don’t seem to realize that they are at war with England.” Moreover, he recalled being warmly welcomed by cries of “Anglichanni!” Ordinary people frequently regarded them as special, often evoking their memory of “the good Gladstone”, [William Gladstone (1809–1898)] a figure  widely admired for his outspoken support of Bulgarian independence from the Ottomans.

Even if the commandant couldn’t understand why, Cowan and Howe had to be  punished. After their first escape attempt, they were sent to a camp otherwise reserved for Serbian prisoners. Here they met with arbitrary and sadistic violence, starvation, and rampant disease.

Howe estimated that 3,000 Serbs died of typhus while they were at the camp, including the only Serb doctor. The Brits had been taught to rub paraffin on their skin to drive away lice, while the Serbs had not. Eventually Cowan and Howe met with a Red Cross inspector who got them sent back to Philippopolis, where they proceeded to stage failed escape number three.

This time, the punishment meted out was entirely different. They were sent to an army barracks near Sevlievo, where the congenial commander offered them parole to live freely in the town. 

Amazingly, the prisoner parcel system run by the Red Cross worked. Cowan sent his mother a long list of his requirements—everything from fruitcake and kippers to his favorite felt hat and some boxing gloves, Kipling anthologies, and French grammar books. A few months later, the sealed packages would arrive intact. Among these items were Cowan’s dental tools. 

So they rented a house and set up a much-needed dental practice. Having no anaesthetics, Howe’s job was to immobilize the patient’s head while Cowan would perform the work, especially extractions. 

Howe discovered that  “In Sevlievo, I could write a cheque on any old piece of paper, address it to Messrs Cox & [Co.] in Whitehall [his regiment’s bankers], and the locals would cash it for me.” Such was the respect shown to a British officer. 

Cowan and Howe both proved to be gifted linguists, and had quickly become fluent in Bulgarian. Crucial to the myth of the three-year contract, they were also able to mingle with ordinary Bulgarians—in the dental practice, cafes, barracks, shops and even on the streets—picking up bits of  news and gossip.

In September 1918, upon hearing rumors that the front was collapsing, Cowan and Howe simply informed their captors that they were leaving for awhile, and no one stopped them. They spent several days traveling a hundred miles over roads and trains over-filled with rebellious soldiers going home. However, Cowan and Howe didn’t go toward the Allied forces. Instead they headed to the capitol, Sofia, which was awash in political turmoil—Tsar Ferdinand I had abdicated, Stamboliyski was freed, and a peasant revolt was heating up. 

A Zeppelin over Sofia, 1915

Arriving at the chaotic rail station, they caught a horse-drawn cab to the nearly deserted Ministry of War, where, despite their less than spiffy uniforms, they brazenly announced that they were an advance party of British officers and were taking control in the name of His Majesty King George. No one raised an objection. A ministry car and driver were found to take the pair to the city’s Grand Hotel—the headquarters of the German mission—where they demanded and got the best rooms in the house. An hour later, having washed and shaved, they entered the hotel dining room, which was full of Germans. Undeterred, the pair informed the maître d' that they required the head table and would he tell the two gentlemen currently seated there to kindly move? At which request the senior German officers concerned rose wordlessly and left their seats. Then one of the Brits raised a champagne toast: “Long live England—vive les alliés,” while the Germans only glared. It was great fun, but they knew that it couldn’t last. Not too long after, they slipped away, returning to their captors in Sevlievo in order to avoid being listed as deserters when the British got there. 

“It was a great moment,” remembered Howe. “One of the greatest moments of my life—perhaps never again one like it. One of those moments when you know there is nothing you cannot do, when no obstacles exist, when no one can touch you.”

After the war, both went on to have long careers with the Foreign Office. In retirement in the 1970’s, Howe wrote about his experiences in unpublished memoirs, including his account of an occasion shortly after the war, when as a junior diplomat in Belgrade [Britain didn’t have an Embassy in Sofia until 1939] he met the political architect behind the plot, even discussing the matter with him at a function in Bulgaria’s royal palace. Later, Cowan corresponded with Cyril Falls CBE (1888–1971), author of the official British history,  History of the Great War, and he gave Cowan’s story a footnote.

According to Sheppard, the French and British had gathered intelligence that indicated poor morale in the Bulgarian Army before the Battle of Dobro Pole (15–18 September 1918), and indeed the depleted Bulgarian 2nd and 3rd Divisions were overcome by the  French, Greek, and Serbian attackers. Sheppard has also found some mentions in Bulgarian histories and oblique references in both Ludendorff’s and Hindenburg's memoirs.

A Bulgarian Officer Surrenders His Unit at the End of September

Sheppard argues that Cowan and Hope are strong witnesses for the veracity of the three-year contract. They both independently stated that the public believed that it was real and that it was a brainstorm of Alexander Stamboliyski. Although the Agrarian leader never acknowledged this, he also never lived to write his memoirs—he was assassinated in 1923.   

Though unaware of the fact at the time, the two friends later believed that they had witnessed a momentous act of Balkan propaganda that had a profound effect not only on the Bulgarian soldiery but also on the increasingly fragile mindset at Germany’s high command and its head, the de facto dictator, Erich Ludendorff. 

The story of  Cowan and Hope’s adventure in Sofia could certainly make an entertaining screenplay. 

Order HERE

Sources: Aspects of History, Balkan Dave, History Is Now,  Key Military, National World War One Museum, and The Salonika Campaign Society 

Recommended Apparel for World War One Commemorative Events

Honor Guard 2025 Victory Memorial Garden Ceremony
Elysian Park, Los Angeles

Being the galactic center for all things World War I, Roads to the Great War has historically received inquiries on a vast variety of topics.  One of these has been in regard to what might be suitable clothing to wear at an  Armistice-Veterans-Remembrance Day commemoration.  Sadly, we have not had a resident fashion advisor on our editorial staff to provide any advice on these matters. This year, however, our long-time contributor, Courtland Jindra and his fellow Friends of Elysian Park in Los Angeles have set an example for all of us who regularly attend World War I events.  

Every year they commemorate their restoration of their favorite park's Victory Memorial Grove and its Daughters of the American Revolution monument. Your editor has attended dozens of such events, but he has never found himself in the presence of such a gorgeously garbed group. He believes the  Friends of Elysian Park have set a new standard for such future events and recommends their approach to all of the World War I community.

For Gentlemen

Male Attendees Selected Either the British Regimental Look or the Yankee Straw Boater Style. Blue Blazers and—of course—Red Poppies Were Mandatory. 

For Ladies

There Was a Delightful Variety—Elegant Casual to Beachside—
in the Fashion Styles of the Female Attendees, Who Also Proudly Displayed Their Red Poppies. (Hopefully, There Will Be More Great Hats at Next Year's Event.)

Three Poem of Isaac Rosenberg Read

Self-Portrait in Steel Helmet (1916)
Isaac Rosenberg, 1890–1918

Isaac Rosenberg was an English poet and artist born to parents of Jewish heritage, who had immigrated from Lithuania. His Poems from the Trenches (printed posthumously in 1922)  are recognized as some of the most outstanding poetry written during the First World War.

In 1915, lacking any job prospects and with the war in Germany heating up, Rosenberg decided to enlist in the Bantam Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment. He was sent to the Western Front in 1916, and would never rise above the rank of private. On 1 April 1 1918, while on night patrol south of Arras, Rosenberg was killed in battle. His body was never found. 

Break of Day in the Trenches 

The Immortals

Returning, We Hear the Larks 

Ten Thoughts from Pacifist Romain Rolland Inspired by the War

Romain Rolland

Romain Rolland (born 29 January 1866, Clamecy, France—died 30 December 1944, Vézelay) was a French novelist, dramatist, and essayist, an idealist who was deeply involved with pacifism, the search for world peace, and the analysis of artistic genius. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915.

In 1912, after a brief career in teaching art and musicology, he resigned to devote all his time to writing. He collaborated with Charles Péguy in the journal Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine, where he first published his best-known novel, Jean-Christophe, 10 vol. (1904–12). For this and for his pamphlet Au-dessus de la mêlée (1915; Above the Battle), a call for France and Germany to respect truth and humanity throughout their struggle in World War I, he was awarded the Nobel Prize. His thought was the centre of a violent controversy and was not fully understood until 1952 with the posthumous publication of his Journal des années de guerre, 1914–1919 (Journal of the War Years, 1914–1919). In 1914 he moved to Switzerland, where he lived until his return to France in 1937. In the 1930s, Rolland grew closer and closer to the Parti communiste français (PCF), the French Communist Party, and became part of the anti-fascist movement. 

______________________________

• I find war detestable but those who praise it without participating in it even more so.

• Love of my country does not demand that I shall hate and slay those noble and faithful souls who also love theirs. . . What ideal have you held up to the devotion of these youths so eager to sacrifice themselves? Their mutual slaughter! 

• A great nation assailed by war has not only its frontiers to protect: it must also protect its good sense. It must protect itself from the hallucinations, injustices, and follies which the plague lets loose. 

• One day History will pass judgment on each of the nations at war; she will weigh their measure of errors, lies, and heinous follies. Let us try to make ours light before her!

• Europe is like a besieged town. Fever is raging. Whoever will not rave like the rest is suspected. And in these hurried times when justice cannot wait to study evidence, every suspect is a traitor.

• It must be admitted that on neither side have they brought honor to the cause of reason, which they have not been able to protect against the winds of violence and folly.

• We cannot stop the war, but we can make it less bitter. There are medicines for the body. We need medicines for the soul, to dress the wounds of hatred and vengeance by which the world is being poisoned. 

• Of what use are such as cannot serve! Yet these are the most innocent victims of this war. They have not taken part in it, and nothing had prepared them for such calamities. 

• O young men that shed your blood with so generous a joy for the starving earth! O heroism of the world! What a harvest for destruction to reap under this splendid summer sun! Young men of all nations, brought into conflict by a common ideal, making enemies of those who should be brothers; all of you, marching to your death, are dear to me. 

• The newspapers of both countries give publicity only to prejudiced stories unfavorable to the enemy. One would imagine that they devote themselves to collecting only the worst cases, in order to preserve the atmosphere of hatred. . .

He Stands for All the Fallen: Lt. Quentin Roosevelt, 95th Aero Squadron–Video

(A Tip –  Enable Captions! Narrator is excellent, but speaks rapidly.)

A Canadian Classic: Barometer Rising by Hugh MacLennan

Devastated Halifax, 6 December 1917

By Hugh MacLennan

New Canadian Library, 2007 (1941)

Susanne Marshall, Reviewer

Originally presented in The Canadian Encyclopedia 

Barometer Rising was the first novel published by Hugh MacLennan, arguably Canada's most significant novelist of the middle of the 20th century and certainly its most recognized. First published  in 1941 amidst the turmoil of the Second World War, the novel is set during the First World War, not on the battlefields of Europe but in Canada before, during, and after the Halifax Explosion, which destroyed much of that city's north end on the morning of 6 December 1917. MacLennan himself was a survivor of the explosion and drew on his own memories as a boy of ten who witnessed the destruction. Barometer Rising marks a shift in MacLennan's writing from works with international themes—which failed to find publishers—to the decidedly nationalist theme that occupies his major works.

Barometer Rising is an allegory of Canada's shift away from the political and cultural influences of colonial, imperial Britain to a decolonized independence and emergent national consciousness throughout the course of the First World War. The mythological template of Homer's Odyssey is clearly in evidence throughout the book; the tale of a hero's return and redemption is also the narrative of a culture's coming of age. Protagonist Neil MacRae returns to Nova Scotia from the battlefields of Europe, where his body, mind, and reputation have been battered. His morally bankrupt Anglophile uncle, Geoffrey Wain, the former colonel of his regiment, has blamed him for the failure of an attack, and MacRae is under threat of prosecution and execution for cowardice. 

While MacRae and Penelope Wain, who is the colonel's daughter and MacRae's former lover, seek to clear his name, Col. Wain seeks to bury the past and profit from the opportunities the war presents. The explosion literally blows the old order apart, disintegrating its cynicism and hollow ideals and affording MacRae the chance to emerge an active hero for a new generation and a country on the brink of renewal. At the end of the novel, MacRae and Penelope Wain are poised to depart from "old" Halifax for the dynamic potential of the westward regions of the country.

Certainly, the novel has had its share of criticism. George Woodcock, classifying it as "romantic realism," noted MacLennan's relative conservatism, in contrast to literary movements of the time; his works' didacticism and sometimes simplistic characterization; and their reliance on local colour and on coincidence. Barometer Rising has aged better than many of MacLennan's works, nevertheless contemporary critics and readers often find the quality and tone of his nationalism jarring. Barometer Rising suggests the new role of Canada is to be a bridge between Britain and America . . .

Order HERE

Nevertheless, Barometer Rising's immediate popularity—sufficient to allow MacLennan to leave his teaching post at Lower Canada College—has not waned; it remains beloved by Canadian readers who savour MacLennan's skilled and powerful evocations of the atmosphere of wartime Halifax, of the chaotic horror of the explosion and its aftermath, and the heroic efforts of the survivors. Furthermore, by the middle of the 20th century, Canadian readers were hungry for Canadian subjects; Barometer Rising announced a turn in literary production in Canada to consciously Canadian stories about the growing nation and its people, which continued in a flowering of Canadian literary nationalism in the following decades.

Susanne Marshall

After the Marne—A Second War of Movement Ensued

A series of running battles were fought in the race to the sea. For a month and [a] half both armies slipped north leaving a path of total destruction called the "Kingdom of Death."

Charles Casimer Krawczyk, Remembrance: As Long As We Live

Fall 1914: French Cavalry on the Move

Clearly the first month of the war was one of movement featuring long marches, corresponding retreats, and brief holding actions. In month two, there was the Battle of the Marne and the retreat to the Aisne, where things started to get bogged down trench-wise, as was also happening over in the Vosges Mountains near the Swiss border. However, there were three areas where the combatants still saw opportunities for mobile warfare and potentially decisive action: Flanders, Lorraine, and in the area just west and north of where the main forces had found themselves bogged down, which would become known as the locale of the "Race to the Sea."

After the September 1914 Battle of the Marne, big sections of the battlefields in France and Flanders seemed to be "locking up," especially along the Aisne River and in the Alsace. None of the commanders, however, could accept the stalemate, so improvised efforts were attempted to seek a decision via a breakthrough or flanking maneuver in the post-Marne Second War of Movement. Alas, these attempts failed and left the combatants doomed to the "Long War" of 1914–18. Nevertheless, a close study of these operations reveals that within them were both the same lost opportunities for victory and the war-shaping events characteristic for the longer struggle that took place in the First War of Movement, when the Schlieffen Plan and Plan XVII were guiding the commanders.

Memorial in Souchez (Artois) Commemorating
Fighting in October 1914

Alas, no one would gain an advantage in the Race to the Sea. One last opportunity to avoid total trench warfare would fail in Flanders on the last day of October 1914. The Western Front was in lockdown. It would not move dramatically until the first Ludendorff Offensive launched on 21 March 1918. The forces in France and Flanders, the men being mobilized, and tens of thousands of schoolboys not yet aware of their military destinies, were condemned to 1,236 days of trench warfare and many failed attempts to break out of it.

Source:  March 2021 St. Mihiel Trip-Wire

As War Approached Progressives Came to Power in America

Click on Image to Enlarge

The 1912 Presidential Candidates

Dennis Cross

The election year 1912 in the United States was one of the most consequential in the country's history. For the first time, a presidential election pitted three presidents against each other: the incumbent, his predecessor, and the man who prevailed over both of them to become the next president. After leaving the White House in 1909, Theodore Roosevelt embarked on an extended big game hunting trip to Africa. He returned to the United States in 1910 to a tumultuous welcome and news of dissension within his party.  The progressive movement was gathering strength and Republican progressives were increasingly disenchanted with William Howard Taft, Roosevelt's successor and protégé.  By early 1912 Roosevelt was edging closer to challenging Taft for the party's nomination, and by March his “hat [was] in the ring.” One of the measures advocated by progressives, choosing delegates to party conventions by primaries rather than state party conventions, had been adopted by several states. Roosevelt entered and won a number of primaries, but Taft controlled the party machinery in most of the other states. Going into the convention, the outcome would depend on the resolution of challenges to the credentials of delegates supporting the president. 

The Democratic field was even more wide open. William Jennings Bryan won the party's nomination in three of the last four election years, starting with his “cross of gold” speech at the Democratic convention in 1896. In 1912 he was still the leading progressive voice in the party, but no longer an active candidate for the nomination.  Some delegations supported favorite son candidates, and some arrived at the convention uncommitted, effectively controlled by local organizations like New York's Tammany Hall. Four candidates led the field. The leading competitors for the progressive vote were Speaker of the House Champ Clark of Missouri, a longtime Bryan supporter, and Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey, a relative newcomer to the progressive cause. Governor Judson Harmon of Ohio was the candidate of northern conservatives, while Representative Oscar Underwood of Alabama was the candidate of the Deep South.  Governor Wilson surged to an early lead in the pre-convention campaign, but more recently Speaker Clark won some important primaries and prevailed in a number of state party conventions. He had the lead in the delegate count going into the convention.  

The Republicans went first. At their convention in June in Chicago, Roosevelt forces mounted challenges to the Taft delegations, but the convention chairman, Elihu Root (secretary of war and of state under Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt, and since 1909 a United States senator from New York), made rulings that resulted in those challenges being rejected. Irate at what they considered theft, most of the Roosevelt delegates walked out of the convention, met with Roosevelt at a hall across town, and resolved to form a new Progressive Party with Roosevelt at its head. Back in the convention, the remaining delegates nominated President Taft for a second term.  

The Democrats arrived in Baltimore for their convention the following week, anticipating a protracted fight for the nomination. In addition to the scattered field of candidates, the Democratic Party, unlike the Republicans, required a two-thirds majority to decide on a nominee. Speaker Clark led on the first several ballots and seemed to have the nomination within his grasp when, on the tenth ballot, Tammany Hall switched New York's vote from Harmon to Clark, giving him a majority. The South held firm for Underwood, however, and during the roll call on the 14th ballot Bryan announced his support for Wilson. A gradual slippage of support from Clark to Wilson followed, and Wilson was finally nominated on the 46th ballot.  

In August, the Republican progressives returned to Chicago where they nominated Roosevelt by acclamation as the standard bearer of their new party. The bitter split in the Republican Party virtually guaranteed a Democratic victory. Taft, a victim of the progressive temper of the times, was unlikely to be reelected in any event, and  Roosevelt's best hope was frustrated by the Democrats' nomination of Wilson, who  was well positioned to compete effectively for the progressive vote. In the general election, although he won less than 42 percent of the popular vote, Wilson swept the Electoral College with 435 votes to 88 for Roosevelt and only eight for Taft. The Socialist Party, led by Eugene Debs, won almost a million popular votes, the best showing in its history. 

Source: The Journal of the World War One Historical Association, Fall 2012

Map Series #26 France's Red Zones

"Access Forbidden" on the Verdun Battlefield

More than a century after the end of WWI, an area the size of Paris is still off limits. This archipelago of Red Zones remains pockmarked with deadly explosives and chemicals. They are silent witnesses to the long-lasting environmental impact of modern warfare. In some parts of France, World War I has never ended. These are the Zones rouges–an archipelago of former battlegrounds so pockmarked and polluted by war that, more than a century after the end of hostilities, they remain unfit to live or even farm on.

By 1919, the French Ministry for the Liberated Territories had divided the afflicted areas into three zones, depending on the degree of destruction:

• Zones vertes ("Green Zones"), with minimal damage;

• Zones jaunes ("Yellow Zones"), with heavy but limited damage; and

• Zones rouges ("Red Zones"), usually closest to the former front lines, which were completely destroyed.

Click on Image to Enlarge

The Green and Yellow Zones were returned to civilian use relatively early. The Red Zones were different. They were, in the words of one official postwar report, “completely devastated. Damage to properties: 100%. Damage to agriculture: 100%. Impossible to clean. Human life impossible.” Red zones were cleared only superficially and mostly just closed off.

In 1919, these Red Zones covered around 690 square miles (1,800 km2). Here, the ground remained saturated with unexploded ordnance. High concentrations of heavy metals and chemicals in the soil further increased the risk to life and limb. For reasons of safety and sanitation, these areas were strictly off-limits for housing, farming, and even forestry.

By 1927, the Red Zones had been reduced by 70 percent to around 190 square miles (490 sq/km), in part due to pressure from local farmers, who wanted to return their fields and pastures to productivity and profit.

An Innocent Looking Trail—But Access Forbidden

Today, the Red Zone archipelago has shrunk to about 40 square miles (100 sq/km), about the size of Paris. Yet it’s unlikely that these islands will disappear soon. They are the most tenacious residue of a long-lasting environmental problem.

Sources: "La terre des régions dévastées"–Journal d'Agriculture Pratique 34 (1921);  Big Think, 7 February 2021; Atlas Obscura

Growing Concern in Germany—Intelligence Reports About Russia in 1910 & 1911

Tsar Nicholas II Inspecting Pilot Candidates for the Expanding Imperial Air Service

By Terence Zuber

The best indicator of the improvements in the Russian political, economic, and military situation in 1910 and 1911 is to be found in the German intelligence summaries. The Germans thought that the Russians had not only repaired the damage from the Manchurian War and internal disorders of 1904–05 but were also in the midst of industrial economic take-off, the Russian economy booming and providing vastly improved material conditions  for the Russian military. 

The German 1910 intelligence summary said that the combat power of the Russian army had increased significantly. The Russians had conducted a massive reorganization: reserve cadres and fortress garrisons had been transformed into maneuver units. Together with some existing active-army formations, this allowed the creation of four new corps in European Russia (XXIII–XXV and III Caucasus), as well as two new corps in Siberia (IV and V Siberian), producing a significant gain in combat power with no increase in peacetime strength. The peacetime garrisons of a number of units were moved out of Poland to the east to co-locate with their recruiting districts, allowing a faster mobilization. Although there was little improvement in the Russian rail net in the west in 1910, most of the new construction being in the east, the Russian rail net was so far developed that a peacetime concentration of units in Poland was no longer necessary—they could be deployed from the interior quickly by rail. The shift to peacetime garrisons in the interior of Russia therefore did not reduce the Russian threat to East Prussia.  

The Russians were de-emphasizing fixed fortifications in favour of mobile warfare. The Russians—still replacing stocks of equipment drawn down for the Manchurian War—allotted 100 million gold marks for this purpose in 1911. The Russians expanded the use of large-scale practice mobilizations: only 86,000 marks had been allocated to this purpose in 1910, while 259,000 marks were was also allocated in 1911. 

Russian  Model 1910 107mm Siege Gun

Their  artillery improving at lightning speed. By the end of 1911 the field artillery batteries were equipped with modern systems (recoil brakes, armoured shields, aiming circles). By the spring of 1911 each of the active-army corps would be equipped with a section (two batteries) of Krupp 12cm howitzers. On order for delivery in the spring of 1912 were 180 Schneider 15cm howitzers, which would give the Russians a capability similar to the German heavy field artillery (Schwere Artillerie des Feldheeres), which was one of the trumps of the German army. On order for the Russian siege artillery were 180 Schneider 10.7cm cannons. The gun was initially developed and produced by the French arms manufacturer Schneider, but was later built by the Putilovski and Obukhov plants in Saint Petersburg.

Internal security and in Russia was good. Discipline in the army continued to improve, although there were still incidents of revolutionary agitation. The harvests in 1909 1910 had been good, and for the first time in many years the Russian government enjoyed a budget surplus. Overall budgetary spending in 1911 was to increase by 230 million marks. The nationalistic majority in the Duma had approved increasing defence expenditures without demur.  

Ready to March–Russian Infantry

The German intelligence estimate for 1911 noted that the Russian army was making great efforts to speed up mobilization and deployment, adopting procedures similar to those of the French army. It was estimated that the Russians would mobilize 34 reserve divisions in European Russia and three in East Asia. The 1911 practice mobilizations were thought to have produced good results. The Russian active army consisted of 37 corps (74 divisions), so that with the 34 reserve divisions the Germans expected the Russian army—fully deployed in the west—would included 108 divisions. In the 1910–11 Aufmarsch I Ost [Deployment Plant] the Germans intended to deploy 15 divisions in the east and the Austrians had 48 divisions, for 63 divisions in total. The Austro-Germans would be effectively outnumbered 2 to 1.

From 1912: "Planning for War" by Terence Zuber, Journal of the World War One Historical Association, Fall 2012

A One-Man Wave of Terror Struck America in 1915

Bomb Damage in the U.S. Senate

Shortly before midnight on Friday2 July 1915 police responded to the U.S. Capitol where an explosion had just rocked the Senate wing. Fortunately they found no fatalities–a byproduct of the fact that Congress was not in session and the building was lightly staffed at night. But, there was plenty of destruction and, obviously, great concern about security.

The next evening, Washingtonians opened their Evening Star newspaper to find a peculiar letter under the headline "Letter Received by the Star Thought to Have Bearing on the Explosion." The diatribe began "Unusual times and circumstances call for unusual means" and quickly moved into a critique of American businesses supplying warring European countries with armaments.

Paradoxically, the letter claimed that the attack on the Capitol was a call for peace "Europe needs enough noncontraband material to give us prosperity. Let us not sell her EXPLOSIVES! Let each nation make her own man-killing machines. Sorry I had to use explosives. (Never again.) It is the export kind and ought to make enough noise to be heard above the voices that clamor for blood money. This explosion is the exclamation point to my appeal for Peace!"

The letter was signed, "R. Pearce" and included a postscript: "We would, of course, not sell to the Germans either, if they could buy here." It had been postmarked less than two hours before the bomb went off.

Beside the letter ran an account of the other big news of the day.

The morning after the Capitol explosion, banker J.P. Morgan had been attacked in his summer home on Long Island, New York, by an assailant who carried two revolvers and a briefcase packed with dynamite. Morgan suffered two flesh wounds before house servants overpowered the man and tied him up on the front lawn to await police.

Erich Muenter

When Glen Cove, New York, detectives arrested him, the gunman identified himself as Cornell University German Professor Frank Holt. He told authorities that he had never intended to hurt Morgan–he just wanted to scare him. In a statement to the Justice of the Peace, Holt claimed, "My motive in coming here was to try to force Mr. Morgan to use his influence with the manufacturers of munitions in the United States and with the millionaires who are financing the war loans to have an embargo put on shipments of war munitions so as to relieve the American people of complicity in the deaths of thousands of our European brothers.

District of Columbia Chief Detective Robert Boardman found the similarities between Pearce's letter and Holt's statement curious. After applying pressure the investigators got Holt to confess. It turned out that his name wasn’t even Frank Holt. . .  or R. Pearce. It was Erich Muenter. And Erich Muenter had quite a past. He was a committed German Nationalist and connected with Germany's network of saboteurs in America. Unfortunately, on 6 July he committed suicide in his jail cell and took many secrets with him.

Source article from WETA Television Network's Blog

Remembering a Veteran: Captain D'Urban Victor Armstrong, 151 Squadron RFC/RAF

Born in the Colony of Natal on 26 July 1897, and educated at Hilton College, D'Urban Victor Armstrong joined the Royal Flying Corps in 1915. He was assigned to No. 60 Squadron the following year; while with them, he scored his first victory on 9 November 1916. His next posting was to No. 44 Squadron on home defense duties. His last assignment was to 151 Squadron.

He was one of the first night fighter victors in aerial warfare, as 151 Squadron was the Royal Air Force's first night fighter squadron. Armstrong was credited with four nighttime victories between 29 June and 17 September 1918, including a Gotha G bomber on 24 August near Bouvincourt-en-Vermandois, France. Two days after war's end, Armstrong was killed in a flying accident while flying aerobatics in his Sopwith Camel. He was awarded the DFC for a night patrol in a driving rainstorm. The citation described him as "a brilliant pilot of exceptional skill."

His death was strikingly described in Cecil Lewis's Sagittarius Rising 

I suppose everyone who saw him would agree that Armstrong was the finest pilot in the Force. He was a past master at that most dangerous and spectacular business of stunting near the ground. He would take his Camel off and go straight into a loop. The Camel, if the engine held, gained about ten feet on it. If the engine spluttered or missed, he was for it. . . Then, one day, he was spinning down to the ground, with him a favorite method of descent; but he left it too late, pulled out, thought he had not enough room, jerked back the stick before the machined had flying speed, went into another spin, and struck the ground. He was killed outright. They found his tongue on the engine.

 

Sources: Biographical sketch from Wikipedia, photo from the Imperial War Museum.

 

French Generals of the Great War: Leading the Way

Tomb of Maréchal Foch, Les Invalides

Edited by Jonathan Krause and William Philpott 

Pen & Sword Military, 2023

Roy A. Prete, Reviewer

This book is designed to fill a significant gap in the literature on French generals who led the French Army to victory in the First World War and to assess how they adapted strategically, operationally, and tactically to the changed condition of industrial war. Drawing on the rich material now available in French military and political archives, this pioneer volume, written by a team of experts, gives us a fresh appraisal of the performance of 12 French generals, from the highest to less prominent levels of command.

To those schooled in the notion that the French Army started out in the First World War with a mistaken idea of modern warfare—that the appropriate response to increased firepower was l’offensive à outrance—and was slow to adapt to the demands of the new industrial warfare of the 20th century, the subtitle, “Leading the Way,” in this volume on French generals may come as a surprise. But interpretations have changed, particularly over the last two decades. The publication in 2003 of Anthony Clayton’s Paths of Glory: The French Army 1914–18 gave a quite favorable portrayal of the performance of the French Army in the First World War, while the paradigm-changing volume of Michel Goya in 2004, La chair et l’acier: l’armée francaise et l’invention de la guerre moderne (1914–1918) (available in translation since 2018), affirmed that “France created the first modern army” with more tanks and airplanes in 1918 than any other.

Appraisals of the performance of the French Army and the quality of its leadership have continued to rise since these publications, with the outstanding scholarly studies by Robert A. Doughty and Elizabeth Greenhalgh on the French Army in the First World War, and the latter’s excellent tome on Ferdinand Foch.  The French Army, in fact, was the mainstay of the Entente coalition, and even after the mutinies of 1917, played a decisive role in 1918, in repelling German advances north of the Somme and on the Marne and in the subsequent Allied march to victory.

The transformed army was able to respond to German infiltration tactics, and with its British and American allies, smash through German trenches in a victorious counteroffensive. In this optic, the performance of French generals, their challenges, their defeats and their triumphs, and their adaptation to the new conditions of trench warfare is entirely apropos.

Order HERE

Distinguished British scholars Jonathan Krause and William Philpott have originated and edited this notable volume. Krause, who is known for his work on the development of French tactics in the Second Battle of Artois in 1915, fittingly wrote the chapter on General Philippe Pétain. Known for his extensive publications on the First World War, including Anglo-French command relations, attrition warfare and his two books on the Battle of the Somme, Philpott has contributed four chapters on French generals, including those on Joseph Joffre, commander-in-chief of the French Army through 1916 and Marie Émile Fayolle, who was Army Group Commander next to the British Army in 1918. In a first-rate introductory chapter, the book’s editors explore in detail the “Leadership and Learning” process of battlefield experience, the evaluation of successes and failures, and adaptations that lay at the base of the transformation of the French Army. Their assessment is that, given the size of the problems associated with the maneuver of mass armies and the increased firepower on the battlefield, these leaders used a fruitful method of assimilating evidence learned from courses taught at the École supérièure de guerre [Superior War College] to develop the tactics, tactical organisation, technologies and logistics to breach the trenches and restore movement on the battlefield. . . 

While this treatment of 12 generals does not exhaust the list of French generals who contributed significantly to the French war effort, it provides a major contribution to the literature representing the “range, ability and achievement of the men who led France and her allies to victory” (p. x).

Roy A. Prete

Source: Prete, Roy A. Review of  French Generals of the Great War: Leading the Way  edited by Jonathan Krause and William Philpott. Canadian Military History 33, 1 (2024)

The Great War on the Italian Front–A Chronology

Prosperity in War—Uncertainty in Peace: The Case of American Wheat Farmers

Idaho Wheat Farmer c.1920

Robert Marcell, Homestead National Monument of America

Once war erupted in Europe in 1914, farmers in the United States stood to make significant financial gains from the fighting going on across the Atlantic. In The Worst Hard Time, Timothy Egan wrote that:

[N]o group of people took a more dramatic leap in lifestyle or prosperity, in such a short time, than wheat farmers on the Great Plains. In less than ten years, they went from subsistence living to small business-class wealth, from working a few hard acres with horses and hand tools to being masters of wheat estates, directing harvests with wondrous new machines, at a profit margin in some cases that was ten times the cost of production. In 1910, the price of wheat stood at eighty cents a bushel, good enough for anyone who had outwitted a few dry years to make enough money to get through another year and even put something away. Five years later, with the world grain supplies pinched by the Great War, the price had more than doubled. Farmers increased production by 50 percent. 

When the Turkish navy blocked the Dardenelles, they did a favor for dryland wheat farmers that no one could have imagined. Europe had relied on Russia for export grain. With Russian shipments blocked, the United States stepped in, and issued a proclamation to the plains: plant more wheat to win the war. And for the first time, the government guaranteed the price, at two dollars a bushel, through the war, backed by the wartime food administrator, a multimillionaire public servant named Herbert Hoover. Wheat was no longer a staple of a small family but a commodity with a price guarantee and a global market.

During the war, many small wheat farmers were making more money than the factory workers on Ford assembly lines (and about eight times more at that). Wealthier farmers, such as Kansas farmer Ida Watkins with her 2,000 acres of wheat, could do even better. Watkins bragged that she had made a profit of $75,000 one year, which was “bigger than the salary of any baseball player but Babe Ruth and more money than the president of the United States made.”

When the Dust Bowl Came to American Farms c.1930
(Bettmann/Getty)

The reason that this is in Egan’s award-winning book on the Dust Bowl is, of course, because this ramped-up farming—continued well after the end of the war—is what led in part to that great environmental catastrophe. . . Indeed, one of the questions raised by this paper is what role did [the war] play in the “Plow-Up” of the 1920s that led in part to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s? Nevertheless, with the future unknown, for the period of the war itself and in the years that shortly followed it seemed like a very good time to [farm].

Source:  Adapted from "World War I and the Homestead Act of 1862: When Farmers Fought and Soldiers Farmed for America’s Homestead States," by Robert Marcell, National Park Service Website

Reconsidering Reds

By Editor/Publisher Mike Hanlon 

It has been [over] 40 years since the release of Reds, the much-honored 1981 glorification of the Russian Revolution produced, written, directed, and starred in by Warren Beatty. It's rather hard for a proud former Cold Warrior like myself to recommend a film that was produced by people who apparently had neither read Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago nor grasped the catastrophic costs of the Russian Revolution—20 million deaths in the Soviet Union, 94 million worldwide, according to the authoritative Black Book of Communism. Nonetheless, I think a view of the film (with some major qualifications) might be worth the 3 hours+ investment of your time to view it, even—maybe especially—if you saw it four decades ago.

Beatty plays a left-tilting Harvard-educated journalist from Portland, OR, named John Reed, who found himself in the middle of the Russian Revolution and won fame for an instant-history of that catastrophe, titled Ten Days That Shook the World. His sympathetic treatment earned him the distinction of being the only American buried within the Kremlin walls. 

For me, the outstanding quality of the movie—and which makes it worth re-watching (despite what I'm writing otherwise)—is Beatty's directing, for which he was deservedly awarded the "Best Director" Academy Award. He shows an impressive feel for the scale of historical epic film-making and the need to coherently tie many elements and points-of-view together neatly. The movie still has a fresh look, like it could have been filmed last week, and his on-location selections of Helsinki for Petrograd and Spain's Sierra Nevada for the Caucasus work perfectly as well. The viewer can't help feeling he's watching a grand and important story, artfully presented. When I viewed it again recently, I had the sense I was experiencing an interpretation (the winning side's view) of the Russian Revolution complementary to David Lean's Dr. Zhivago.

Director Beatty interweaves four elements to tell his story, which I will describe and comment on separately:

1. The Love Story: Reed's affair and marriage with Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton) is the pervasive narrative, permeating the entire movie. It's not a compelling or interesting relationship for me as Louise implausibly morphs from candidacy for the "Most Annoying Girlfriend on Earth" title (first hour) to "Most Devoted and Heroic Lovemate" (third hour).

2. Interminable, Boring, and Pompous Radical Intellectual Debates and Arguments: Talk, talk, talk. Fast forward through these scenes. (Better yet, just skip the first hour. It's filled with Louise and Greenwich Village posers.)

3. The Russian Revolution: After that dreadful first hour, Jack and Louise arrive in Russia just in time for the October Revolution. This is the best part of the movie, beautifully filmed, capturing the intense energy of the moment, and revealing the collective awareness of the participants and observers that important history was being made.

4. The Witnesses: The main narrative is supplemented with documentary-style, talking-head cut-ins and voice overs by 32 elderly, mostly left-wing, political and literary "celebrities" who were around at the time of the revolution, some of whom knew Jack or Louise. They are uninhibited and often informative, with on-point anecdotes, bitchy gossip (wow, lefty women have really long memories), and out-of-the-blue non sequiturs. I particularly enjoyed a still sex-addled Henry Miller, the astute Dame Rebecca West, and Georgie Jessel singing his favorite World War One tunes.

Available by DVD or streaming for a fee from Amazon and Netflix.

Source:  Originally presented in the May 2020 St. Mihiel Trip-Wire