Eyewitness: The Trenches as Dante's Inferno

Poilus Heading for the Trenches

Letter from Chasseur á Pied Robet Pellissier

February 7, 1915

. . . My battalion had a devil of a time the second half of January. We went up the range and down the other side to take up the trenches about Steinbach and Uffholz.

Hardly had we reached our positions than the Dutch began to give signs of unusual activity. They began to bombard, and they kept it up day after day. The first forty-eight hours my company was held on reserve and all we could do was to sit in covered trenches and listen to the shells burst in our neighborhood. It was quite a stunt to get out at all as fragments came buzzing along at any time. Although the explosions took place near the regular trenches quite a distance from us we could not have any fires because of the danger of being spotted, and it was freezing pretty hard. Another thing, we could not lie down. The covered ditches being too narrow, we slept with our knees to our chin. 

The third and fourth days we relieved the company in the first line trenches. The one we occupied made me think of Dante‘s Inferno, the part assigned to Brunetto Latini, who runs madly on a sandy plain under a rain of fire. The trench was in yellow mud. In the front of it in the mud there were poor fellows stretched out in their last sleep, fifteen or twenty of them. In addition many humps over the field, all being hastily made graves. The trench was German originally. It had been stormed by the 252nd regiment and turned around to face the German front. The slaughter had been terrible. To our back and to the right was the village of Steinbach, or rather the ghost of the village. My company took it December 13th. It was retaken by the Dutch. Soon after that, taken away from them by line infantry, every house riddled with shot. Few roofs and many black walls, the steeple showing the light right through in a dozen places. To our left was the road of access, and perhaps the most striking element in the picture, every square yard ploughed up by exploded shells. There the earth was red, just as it is near Holyoke. Well, the trees, fruit trees and the vineyards were all red from the amount of dirt kicked up by shells. . .

Sgt. Robert Pellisier

The fifth day and the sixth we were to be in the second line, they made us build an artillery shelter in the back woods. All went serenely until about 4 P.M. There was just the regular number of shells, two or three every five minutes, but at four, by gum, things began to hum, and we received orders to move to the front P.D.Q. My section started up, I pulled out my watch and started to count. It took us eleven minutes to get to our second line position and in that time we received in front and in back to the right and left eighty-two shells.

The noise and the stuff kicked up and the branches cut made an "ensemble" impossible to describe, yet no one was hurt. Our adjutant turned once to shout a command and got his mouth full of dirt. That was all. To me our escaping scot free was a real miracle. Well, the bombardment stopped and before we had time to get to the first line the Dutch had grabbed hold of a bit of trench. All we could do was to dig one right back and so we did. It was pitch dark by that time and as I am not much good at digging, I asked to be put on sentry duty to see that no Boche sneaked up to those who were working. Four of us went about twenty yards forward, sat down and listened. Our artillery had set fire to three houses in the plain. The red smoke was all we could see, but we could hear our men digging and the Germans digging. We were about eighty yards from them, suddenly things started up again. I don’t know who did the starting or why, but we were caught between two perfectly fiendish fusillades. Our light artillery fired over our heads, dangerously close to our pates. The Dutch fired bombs with their trench bombs and their hand grenades. Some kind of fragment finally hit me on the shoulder so I stopped firing and took to cover behind a big log. The other sentinels crept up also and we waited for the storm to slacken.

________________

Robet Pellissier was born in France in 1882. He grew up in the United States and was teaching at Stanford University when the Great War broke out in his homeland. Returning as a voluteer, he initially saw uninterrupted service in the Vosges Mountains. He was killed in action in the Battle of the Somme on 28 August 1916.

This letter excerpt is from:

A Good Idea of Hell: 

Letters from a Chasseur á Pied

Reprinted by permission of the Editor and Publisher. Available at Amazon.com HERE

Remembering a Veteran: Private Frank (Mayo) Lind, Royal Newfoundland Regiment

Francis T. Lind (1879–1 July 1916) Lind, who at age 35,  gave up his successful career as an accountant and became a member of the “First Five-Hundred” Newfoundlanders who signed up for the war effort. Through his highly personal letters home, published in the St. John’s Daily Mail, he quickly emerged as the “Unofficial War Correspondent” of the regiment. 

Mayo as a New Soldier, Second from Left

Thirty-two letters were published during the war and eventually published in book form after the war and reprinted in 2001. His initial combat  experience  was at Gallipoli. He was wounded there and evacuated to Malta. After his recovery, he returned to the Newfoundland Regiment when it was deployed to France in 1916. While in service, he earned the nickname "Mayo" from his frequent appeals for Mayo Tobacco.

Here is his last letter home, written and sent just before moving up to the Somme front.

Sources: The Letters of Mayo Lind: Newfoundland's Unofficial War Correspondent, 1914-1916; NewfoundlandandtheSomme.com

The Military History of the Dreyfus Case

 

What It Was Really All About

By Gerard Demaison

Based on his research carried out   over a period of forty years within the French State archive system, French historian Jean Doise (1917-2006) tied  together the great French scandal, l' Affaire Dreyfus with the development of one of the decisive weapons of the First World War. His findings—the principal source for this article—was published in 1994. It's French title: Un secret bien garde: Histoire militaire de 1'Affaire Dreyfus translates in English to the title for this article A Well Kept Secret: The Military History of the Dreyfus Case.

Jean Doise, held a doctorate in History from the Sorbonne, a second degree from the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris and was also a graduate from the French Army's General Staff College. He pursued a career as a professional French Army military historian and had retired just before publishing this volume. His interest in the military ramifications of the Dreyfus Case date back to an interview he carried out in 1952 with Colonel Emile Rimailho who was then, at the age of 88, the last survivor of the three man team that engineered the development of the famous quick -firing "Modele 1897 "French 75 mm field gun

It has long been demonstrated, in fact since 1898, that Captain Dreyfus was innocent of the charges of espionage pressed against him. Dreyfus had no links whatsoever with an intercepted "list" or "bordereau," of French military documents which was later to be addressed to the German military attaché in Paris, Colonel Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen, in the fall of 1894. This list had been retrieved in a waste paper basket at the German Embassy by a cleaning lady who was in the employ of French military counter-intelligence. This document had been torn up but was easily pieced together. It announced, among other items, a forthcoming report on a new French 120mm howitzer and the comportment of its hydraulic recoil mechanism, as well as detailed manuals describing the current organization of French field artillery.

Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859–1935) in 1894

The old official story goes that this "bordereau" intercepted by French counter intelligence was immediately forwarded to the Defense Minister, General Mercier. The Defense Ministry concluded that the "bordereau" was so diverse and so technical in nature that it had to originate from an artillery officer on the General Staff. Then, the Defense Ministry prepared a short list of potential suspects and the name of Alfred Dreyfus rose to its top. Captain Dreyfus was 35 years old in 1894 and a well-noted artillery officer from prestigious Ecole Polytechnique as well as a graduate from Ecole Superieure de Guerre (the French War College). At the time of his arrest, in 1894, he was completing a training assignment with the Army's General Staff, a clear sign that he was on a career "fast track". Captain Alfred Dreyfus traveled about once a year to Alsace in order to visit his ailing father and the long established family textile business located in Mulhouse. The Dreyfus family had chosen to retain its French nationality at the time of the German annexation of Alsace in 1871, after the Franco-Prussian war. Captain Dreyfus' Alsatian connection, artillery training and the lame charge that the handwriting on the "bordereau"—although interpreted at the time as probably disguised—was likely to be his, led to his arrest.

Captain Dreyfus was court-martialed and sentenced in December 1894 to solitary confinement for life on Devil's Island, in French Guyana. By 1898, however, the real culprit, an obscure French infantry Major by the name of Walsin-Esterhazy was proven to be the real author of the "bordereau". This revelation made by the new chief of military counter-intelligence, Colonel Picquart, was rejected by the French High Command and led to Picquart's dismissal, a world-famous miscarriage of justice.

Eventually, in response to public outcry and intense political pressure from the Left which had recently won the national elections, Alfred Dreyfus was brought back to France, retried in 1899 and amnestied in 1900. He was also reintegrated in the French Army in 1906, with the Legion of Honor.

The real unsolved mystery of the Dreyfus Case has always been the true reason why, in the first place, was there such a high-level cover-up concerning the famous "bordereau" planted at the German embassy. Also, why was Major Esterhazy, the proven but never convicted culprit, let go freely to retire in England. Troubling questions were also posed by Alfred Dreyfus himself and by his son Pierre in their joint memoir published after the Great War of 1914-18: "There is still the need to explain how a low level infantry officer such as Major Esterhazy could have had access to so much detailed and diverse technical information"

Major Charles Esterhazy, 1847–1923

Mr. Doise addresses these questions and makes a convincing case that the Affair was closely tied to the secret development of the quick-firing French 75mm field gun, based on a novel, long recoil hydro-pneumatic system. The new French 75 was technically way ahead of its time: the German and British military did not produce a field gun of comparable performance until nearly the eve of WW 1. Furthermore, the US Army adopted the French 75mm field gun in 1918 and had it built under license in America. Mr. Doise makes a strong case that the "bordereau" used to frame Dreyfus was part of a disinformation exercise organized in 1894 by a Colonel Sandherr, who was then the head of French military counter-intelligence. 

Quite significantly, Mr. Doise documents that the short recoil mechanism of the 120mm Baquet howitzer prototype, prominently quoted in the famous "borderau" destined to the German Military Attaché, had already been rejected as unsuitable. As to the current organization of French field artillery listed in the " bordereau", it would be made obsolete by the secret adoption of the revolutionary 75mm field gun. Furthermore, Mr. Doise demonstrates that the rest of the information on the "bordereau" was "fluff' of little value. He also lists other French deceptions played at that time. In other words, Doise proves that the "bordereau" was a plant containing technically obsolete artillery information that was part of a larger program to throw the Germans off the scent of the 75mm field gun.

Colonel Jean Sandherr (1846–1897)

The main architect of this disinformation was Colonel Sandherr, the head of French military counter-intelligence, assisted by his subordinate, a Major Henry. The higher level originator of this deception is suspected, without formal proof, to have been a General Deloye who supervised all French artillery research and development at the time. Furthermore, Mr. Doise explains how Major Esterhazy, the man who leaked the "bordereau" to the German Embassy, was a double agent masquerading as a French traitor. As a matter of fact, Major Esterhazy had previously worked for French military counter-intelligence, in the early part of his career, and had known both Major Henry and Colonel Sandherr for many years.

To clarify the issues, Mr. Doise analyzes three distinct layers of deception and conspiracy inside the Dreyfus Case:

  An "Alsatian layer "which underlies the beginnings of the Affaire Dreyfus. Captain Alfred Dreyfus came to the attention of a French spy in Alsace, during his yearly visits to his ailing father in Mulhouse, a town which had become German since 1871. This French spy, whose name is divulged in the book, alerted Colonel Sandherr to the fact that Captain Dreyfus had been seen in Mulhouse several times. However these visits to his family in Mulhouse were already known to Captain Dreyfus' own superiors and they had never raised any objections. It is also interesting to note that, besides Alfred Dreyfus himself, the principal protagonists of the Dreyfus Case were also born in Alsace and spoke German fluently as a second language: Madame Bastian the French cleaning lady and spy who was sifting the waste paper baskets at the German Embassy, Colonel Sandherr the chief of French military counterintelligence who organized the framing of Alfred Dreyfus and Colonel Picquart who was first to demonstrate that the author of the "borderau" was Major Esterhazy, thus proving Captain Dreyfus' innocence as early as 1898. It was within this layer that information was gathered to paint Alfred Dreyfus as a credible "traitor."

 The "French 75mm layer" began not by random coincidence, in late 1894, only four months after the novel 75mm field gun prototype had been successfully tested in complete secrecy. A disinformation campaign against the German Military Attaché, Col. Von Schwartzkoppen, by the false spy Esterhazy was then initiated. As part of this effort, Colonel Sandherr, assisted by Major Henry, orchestrated the framing of Captain Dreyfus as a traitor and leaker of military secrets probably in order to make his own counter-espionage agent, Major Esterhazy, credible as a purveyor of French artillery information. The name of Alfred Dreyfus had come to Sandherr's mind as the ideal "patsy" because of Dreyfus' Alsatian connection, coupled to Dreyfus's early professional training as an artillery officer (although Dreyfus had never been involved, even remotely, into the highly secret 75mm field gun research and development).

Eventually, the participants at this level of the conspiracy were all discredited. Major Henry committed suicide in prison in 1898, after being arrested for forging documents designed to further incriminate Alfred Dreyfus. As to Colonel Sandherr, Henry's superior, he left behind the devastation he had brought to Alfred Dreyfus and to the French military establishment by conveniently dying of disease in 1895. Major Esterhazy admitted much later, while in self-imposed exile in England that he was the one who had written the "bordereau" used to incriminate Dreyfus. However, Esterhazy was never condemned by the French for espionage or for the part he had played in the framing of Captain Dreyfus. Instead, he continued to receive a monthly pension from an unknown source, until his death in 1923.

 

The "Cover-up by the French General Staff layer. " This cover-up was pursued by the highest authorities in the French General Staff and took place between late 1894 and 1898. Alfred Dreyfus was rushed to judgment and unjustly condemned because War Minister General Mercier had believed the falsehoods concocted by Sandherr and Henry, and because some of the graphology experts had inaccurately concluded that the author of the "bordereau" was Captain Dreyfus. However the situation became indefensible after 1896 when proof supplied by the new chief of French military counter-intelligence, Colonel Picquart, showed that the "bordereau" had been handwritten by Major Esterhazy himself. Rather than accepting responsibility for this miscarriage of justice, the French military leadership persisted in the cover-up for another two years. A newspaper article by Emile Zola finally blew the case wide open for the public, in 1898.

Because of intense political pressure, Captain Dreyfus was recalled to France and amnestied in 1900. His recall also coincided with the first international exposure of the French 75's performance during the Boxer Rebellion in Peking (China). A French 75 field artillery group [3 batteries of 4 guns] had been sent to China with the international expeditionary force, also in 1900.

The Germans adopted a modern field gun with recoil brakes only in 1901: the well known German 77mm field gun. However, the shells and the time fuses of the French 75, particularly the shrapnel shell with a rear explosive charge that makes the shell behave like a huge shotgun at any distance up to 8kms, were not matched by the Germans until 1915. All the deceptions, however, came close to a Pyrrhic victory since the Dreyfus controversy nearly destroyed France politically and lowered military preparation in 1914 because the politicians had acquired a deep distrust of the General Staff.

Mr. Doise's work is a captivating research volume, with a wealth of new and highly detailed material, thanks to the military and artillery research background of the author and to his unrestricted access to French military archives. Thus it ideally complements the better known literary resources which are already available on the judiciary and political aspects of the Case. Mr. Doise's book only exists in the French language for the time being, but we hope that this review will spur the interest of a translator and publisher for the benefit of the English-speaking readership.

Alfred Dreyfus Grave, Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris

Postscript: In a supreme irony of history only one of the French principals of "Affaire Dreyfus" did actually fight in the defense of his country during the Great War. 

• As noted above, Colonel Sandherr died of natural causes (a stroke) in 1897.

• Major Henry committed suicide with his razor in his prison cell on 31 August 311898.

• Major Esterhazy died of natural causes near London in 1923. He did not participate in World War I.

• Colonel Picquart became Minister of War in Clemenceau's cabinet, in 1908. It is during his tenure that the number of 75 batteries in the French Army was voted by the Chamber of Deputies to be doubled! The Army entered the war in 1914 with 1,000 (a thousand) 75mm batteries of four guns each. Picquart died from a fall while practicing horsemanship on 19 January 1914.

• General Deloye reached the age limit in 1901 and permanently retired.

Source:  France at War @ WorldWar1.com

Who Was Yakov Mikhailovich Yurovsky?

 

Yakov Mikhailovich Yurovsky (1878–1938) was the murderer of Nicholas II and his family. Born into a working-class family in Tomsk, Siberia, Yurovsky experienced hardships that fueled his resentment toward the existing social order. After an early career as a watchmaker, he became involved in revolutionary politics, joining the Bolshevik Party following the 1905 Russian Revolution. By the time of the Russian Civil War, Yurovsky had risen to a position of authority in Yekaterinburg, becoming a member of the Cheka (secret police). Yurovsky's actions contributed to the disunity of White forces and solidified the Bolshevik hold on power during a tumultuous period in Russian history.

Tsar Nicholas II and Family, in Happier Times

Faced with the threat of the White Russian forces attempting to rescue the deposed Tsar Nicholas II and his family, Yurovsky was tasked with organizing and leading the execution squad in July 1918. This brutal act not only eliminated a potential rallying point for the counterrevolutionaries but also left a lasting impact on Russian royalist movements. 

For the next 20 years he served, apparently quite effectively, in various roles for the party in Moscow. Nevertheless, despite the rewards and recognition he received for the assassination and his subsequent activities, Yurovsky became a pariah in Soviet society, grappling with regret in his later years. He died in 1938 and was buried in Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. Rumors circulated after his death that he had been poisoned, either because he was an embarrassment to the regime or as part of one of Stalin's purges.

Yurovsky's official account of the murders can be read HERE.

Sources: EBSCO Information Services; Mediadrum; AlexanderPalace.org

The Ruhleben Internment Camp

1917 Painting of the Camp and Race Track by Detainee Nico Jungman

The Ruhleben internment camp, situated on the outskirts of Berlin, held mostly  British civilian internees from its opening in November 1914 to its closure in November 1918. While the camp suffered from overcrowding, conditions were relatively good, and inmates developed the social life of the camp into a community.

Camp Population

With the outbreak of hostilities, German authorities interned British citizens in Germany, just as other belligerent powers interned “enemy” civilians. In the opening stages of the war British civilians were left at liberty, with only a handful of suspected spies and saboteurs arrested and detained. However, on 6 November 1914, the vast majority of British civilian males in Germany were gathered for internment at the Ruhleben Trabrennbahn, a racecourse situated in the west of Berlin. Between November 1914 and November 1918, some 5,500 British civilians were held there; the population reached a peak of 4,273 in February 1915, and Ruhleben housed around 2,300 internees at the time of the armistice. Its proximity to the center of Berlin meant it became the most visited and widely publicized prison camp in the whole of the German Empire.

Camp Breadline, Nico Jungman

Overcrowding

The Ruhleben camp was around ten acres in size, with 11 barracks to house the internees. Conditions were initially overcrowded, as the German authorities had planned for a prisoner population of around 1,500. Nine more barracks were completed in 1915, but it was only toward the end of the war, when the population was reduced to 2,500, that the problem of overcrowding was solved. The death rate in the camp was around 60 out of the total of 5,500 who passed through the camp during the war. This figure is well below the rate experienced in other civilian camps during the war and is helped by the fact that there were periodic repatriations of invalids and those deemed permanently unfit for military service. Admittedly, Ruhleben did not experience serious health scares such as the typhus epidemics that occurred in some prisoner of war camps. However, the years in internment, while not fatal, did take their toll on the inmates’ health.

Camp Culture

Ruhleben was by no means a typical camp. The relatively good conditions can be attributed to the camp’s location, a stable inmate population, support from humanitarian organizations, and the lack of reprisal punishments. Reciprocity also played a role; Britain and its empire held around 36,000 German civilians in internment by 1917, and any form of punishment against the inmates of Ruhleben would have had consequences for German internees within the British Empire. This good treatment allowed the British inmates to create a rich cultural community in the camp. Ruhleben’s inmates were an extremely diverse group and included people from all social classes within the British Empire. The focus in accounts of the camp was on cultural activities. Inmates engaged in art, theatrer, sport and even mock elections to ensure that the “borough” of Ruhleben was properly represented at Westminster. The camp offers an interesting case study of a community during the war.

Release Day, 22 November 1918

The Residents

Wikipedia lists about 40 "notable" residents of Ruhleben.  The list is surprisingly heavy in musicians and footballers. The first group mainly seems to have been performing when war broke out, the second was apparently involved in coaching German soccer clubs. 

Three well-known physicists were studying or attending conferences when the war broke out:  Henry Brose,  Sir James Chadwick—Nobel Prize recipient for the Discovery of the Neutron— and Sir Charles Drummond Ellis

Probably the most famous tenant—at least during the war—was civilian sea captain Charles Fryatt, who was briefly held at Ruhleben, but was  eventually executed in 1916 for ramming a German U-boat. Article HERE.

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Sources: Encyclopedia, 1914-1918; Lambeth Palace Library Blog 

A Great War Christmas Album

 

How Alfred C. Gilbert Saved Christmas

America's Savior of Christmas

 By James Patton

The Council of National Defense was formed on 24 August 1916 by President Woodrow Wilson under powers granted to the president in the National Defense Act of 1916 (PL 64-85 39 Stat. 166). Among the Council’s regulatory powers was the authority to tell American industry what they could and couldn’t make. 

During the summer of 1918, the Council’s staff proposed a rule that would limit the production of Christmas gifts, especially toys. The objective was twofold: first, to redirect the materials and the industrial capacity toward military requirements, and second, to reinforce in the civilian population a spirit of sacrifice ("doing their bit"). 

The Council staff had not reckoned with push-back. Enter Alfred C. Gilbert (1884–1961), an Oregon-born  Yale medical graduate and athlete who shared a gold medal in the pole vault at the 1908 Olympics in London. He was also an amateur magician, and in 1907 he started a company that sold the “Mysto Magic Exhibition” sets. Building on  this success, in 1913 he added the “Erector Set” to his line, which was a bestseller for nearly 50 years. My brother and I each had one. 

Going back to 1918, Gilbert decided to make the Council of National Defense change its mind about banning toys. Representing the Toy Manufacturers of America, the trade association he had formed in 1915, he traveled to Washington, and after waiting for hours, he was  given 15 minutes to convince them not to effectively cancel Christmas for the nation’s children.

America's Council of National Defense

Facing him across the table were six very powerful men: Secretary of War Newton D. Baker (1871–1937), Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels (1862–1948), Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane (1864–1921), Secretary of Agriculture David F. Houston (1866–1940), Secretary of Commerce William C. Redfield (1858–1932), and Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson (1862–1934).Also present was the non-voting director, Walter C. Gifford (1885–1966), who was on loan from Western Electric.

“The greatest influences in the life of a boy are his toys,” Gilbert began. “Yet through the toys American manufacturers are turning out, he gets both fun and an education. The American boy is a genuine boy and wants genuine toys."

He had brought along a BB gun, made by Daisy Manufacturing of Plymouth, Michigan, (Gilbert never manufactured these) to show the Council how a child wielding a non-lethal weapon could become a skilled marksman, a valuable asset to a nation that relied on citizen-soldiers. He insisted that his construction toys—like the Erector Set—fostered creative thinking. (Consider what one can make today with LEGOs) 

He told these men that toys provided a valuable interlude from the ever-present sacrifices of the war. Given appropriate play objects, a boy’s life could be directed toward “construction, not destruction,” Gilbert said.

Then Gilbert proceeded to lay out some more toys that he had brought along for the Council to examine. Navy Secretary Daniels was enamored with a toy submarine, marveling at the details. He asked Gilbert where he could get one; Gilbert said that it could be bought anywhere in the country. Some of them examined children’s books; yet another guided a wind-up toy locomotive as it putt-putted around the table. Gilbert spotted the fleeting moment where these hard-hitting middle-aged men became little boys again. The decision didn’t come immediately, but Gilbert left Washington knowing that the toys had won. And there was no toy embargo in 1918.

A prolific innovator, Gilbert eventually held over 150 patents. The “Fun with Chemistry” sets, the “Microscope and Lab Set,” and many other "educational" products were also runaway bestsellers. By far his most controversial product was the "U-238 Atomic Energy Laboratory, ” which included radioactive ore samples. My father, who had worked with radioactive materials during WWII, refused to let me get one. I did get the ”Electrical Engineering Set,” which was the basis for the first of my unlicensed radio transmitters. 

From 1938 until 1966, the Gilbert company produced the classic American Flyer series of two-rail toy trains, using both AC and DC and mostly in S-Gauge (1:64). These were made with exquisite detail—the replica steam locomotives even produced "glowing smoke," "chugged," and could even whistle. 

Sadly, in 1961, all of the magic died with Gilbert. His son succeeded him but survived only a year. Gilbert’s daughters then sold the business, and without inspired management, it had to be liquidated in 1967. American Flyer trains were bought by Gilbert’s erstwhile competitor, the legendary Lionel Corp., and the British firm Meccano bought the trademark “Erector,” which they hold to this day. 

Gilbert has been remembered in several ways. The most significant are an internet-based group called the A.C. Gilbert Heritage Society;  a museum in Salem, Oregon, called Gilbert’s Discovery Village; and a made-for-TV movie called The Man Who Saved Christmas, which was a forgettable production that was filmed in Toronto (to get the Canadian tax credits) and was quite slippery on the facts. It was aired here on CBS at Christmas time in 2002.

A Christmas Eve Tradition Born of the Great War: The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols

Since 1918, A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols has offered listeners an opportunity to share in a live, worldwide Christmas Eve broadcast of a service of biblical readings, carols, and related seasonal classical music. This special event is presented by the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, one of the world’s foremost choirs of men and boys, and performed in an acoustically and architecturally renowned venue, the college’s 500-year-old chapel.

Modeled on a program of biblical lessons for a Christmas Eve service at the Truro Cathedral,  the scheme was borrowed, rewritten, and integrated with seasonal music and carols for Christmas 1918, in the immediate aftermath of the First World War by the new dean of King's College, Cambridge, Eric Milner-White. During the First World War, he had volunteered for service as an army chaplain and served on both the Western and Italian Fronts. He was initially appointed senior chaplain to 7th Infantry Division on 15 February 1917 (with temporary promotion to Chaplain to the Forces, 3rd Class). For his service during this period he was Mentioned in Despatches on 24 December 1917 and awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) in the 1918 New Year Honours List. 

Eric Milner-White (1884–1963)
As a Student at Harrow

Milner-White believed the Church of England needed a more inspiring form of worship to reach a generation disillusioned by the atrocities of the Western Front. The BBC first broadcast the King’s service on the radio in 1928. It has aired every year since, to a worldwide audience, with the sole exception of 1930. It is accessible from local radio stations and online. (More on this below.)

In almost every year some carols have been changed and some new ones introduced by successive organists. The strongly Christian narrative of the service, the lessons, and the prayers has remained virtually unchanged.

Chapel of King's College, Cambridge

To Listen or View the 24 December 2025 Event:

For live reception, remember the time difference between Great Britain and North America.  The program in Cambridge begins at 3 p.m. which converts to 8 a.m. California time.

The audio broadcast of the 2025 Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College, Cambridge, will be widely available on many local PBS-affiliated public radio stations in the United States. BBC World Service will make the broadcast available online shortly after its conclusion at this webpage: 

  https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002ntmz

To Learn More About the Festival:

1.  Read the entire program from 2024 HERE.

2.  Or  for your bookshelf:

 

A History of the Festival with a CD of the
Music and Service Can Be Ordered HERE

3. Or, there is also this excellent YouTube video of the 2023 Festival:

Recommended: The Continued Relevance of World War I by Gregory Thiele

 

Look Familiar? 
A Camouflaged Ukrainian Artillery Position, October 2025 

At his excellent military history site  Lead Trace—Thoughts on Military History and Strategy, Greg Thiele has come up with an astute analysis on the continuing influence of the Great War in the 21st century. Here are the opening passages followed by a link to the full article.

World War I ended more than a century ago. For some, it may seem this is so long ago that the war has little relevance today. I hold an entirely different view. I once asserted that if I was forced to select only one war to study, it would be World War I. I still believe this. The First World War remains worthy of detailed examination by military professionals and those interested in military history.

What follows are a few areas where World War I can still illuminate current challenges.  

Attacks on fortified positions / positional warfare  

Trench warfare defined the Western Front throughout most of the war. Both sides struggled with little prospect of success to attack fortifications without suffering horrific casualties. To address the riddle of the trenches, the Allies selected a technical solution using ever-increasing firepower and tanks. The Germans changed their tactics to infiltrate between Allied units, attack in depth and collapse Allied strongpoints from behind. Both sides used firepower in different ways too. The Allies sought to obliterate German defenders so Allied infantry could occupy their objectives. This rarely worked and resulted in large expenditures of ammunition and heavy casualties. The Germans used supporting arms to suppress Allied troops so German units could maneuver effectively. This effect proved far easier to achieve.  More than one hundred years later, weapons have changed, but the nature of the problem has not. Leaders still confront the same basic problem posed on World War I’s Western Front—how to best employ supporting arms and how to effectively attack a fortified position.

Yep, Pretty Familiar
The Somme 1916 or '17

War of maneuver 

World War I’s Eastern Front has been largely forgotten in the west (although this has begun to change lately). In contrast to the trench warfare dominant on the Western Front, the Eastern Front was too vast for trenches to be more than a temporary defensive feature. The Eastern Front was a war of maneuver. The Germans developed infiltration tactics and artillery employment techniques in the east and exported them to the Western Front late in the war.  Those interested in maneuver will find a variety of examples such as the Tannenberg , where the Germans cut off and destroyed a Russian army invading East Prussia in 1914 or the 1915 Gorlice-Tarnow Campaign in which the Germans crippled the Russian armies they faced.

Continue reading the article HERE.

Thanks to Dana Lombardy for bringing this to our attention. MH

Mississippi, USA, Goes to War

Three Soldiers of the 1st Mississippi Rifles, 1916

Chester M. “Bo” Morgan, University of Southern Mississippi

Following the demise of Reconstruction in the 1870s, the outside world troubled Mississippi but little for almost half a century. By 1920, however, the war that Woodrow Wilson hoped would end all wars had thrust the state and its people into the maelstrom of modernity. Most directly affected were the 57,740 Mississippians, three fourths of them draftees, who marched away to make the world safe for democracy in World War I (1914–18, though the United States did not become involved until April 1917).  [Of those who served in the armed forces, over 900 died from various causes.] 

Among those who served was Henry Jetton Tudury of Bay St. Louis, who became the state’s most decorated Doughboy and who was among the 25 Mississippians who earned Distinguished Service Crosses. Seven natives served as general officers, most notably Fox Conner, who, as chief of the General Staff’s Operations Section, developed battle plans for the American Expeditionary Force. His contributions, which Gen. John J. Pershing considered indispensable to Allied victory, earned Conner a Distinguished Service Medal.

General Pershing Decorating Private Tudury

More than any other aspect of the war, the draft engulfed the Magnolia State and its people in the forces of modernization. “This office,” Gov. Theodore Bilbo’s secretary advised a local draft official, “is confronted with a monumental amount of work. . . . There is hardly a moment that a long distance call has not to be answered or a telegram attended to combined with an immense amount of correspondence from the War Department, inquiries from local boards, individuals, Etc.” The Selective Service conducted three registrations, the last and largest of which occurred only two months before the November 1918 armistice. A total of 344,724 Mississippians registered for the draft, but few of the September 1918 pool were inducted. 

The sheer magnitude of national mobilization demanded a bureaucratic efficiency that overshadowed all else and ironically accentuated social and racial prejudices already deeply embedded in the state’s traditional social structure. Bilbo complained to the War Department that “much confusion exists as to just who should be, and who should not be exempted on account of dependents.” Perversely, class often trumped race, as white paternalism and planter self-interest converged to shield black tenant labor from federal regulations that fell more heavily on small independent farmers, black and white alike. Poor whites sometimes came to view the Great War as many of their forbears had seen the Civil War: a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight.

Senator Williams, War Supporter

Despite significant and occasionally violent draft resistance, most Mississippians rallied patriotically to the war effort. Hattiesburg bid for one of 16 large National Army cantonments built during the war, and when Camp Shelby opened in the fall of 1917, it instantly became the state’s largest population center. The following March, Payne Field, an aviation training facility, opened in Clay County, near West Point. Construction of the two installations sparked local economic booms. A decentralized system of councils of national defense coordinated domestic mobilization. From the state council, voluntary campaigns to sell Liberty Bonds, conserve food and fuel, promote patriotism, and harass “slackers” (people who avoided military service) percolated downward through local councils to virtually every crossroads village in the state. In the words of one contemporary, “Men, women, girls, boys, and children eagerly sought work of any kind that helped to ‘carry on.’”

Thousands of Mississippians, mostly women, volunteered for Red Cross duty: cheering and entertaining soldiers; collecting clothes, magazines, canned goods, and money for army camps and soldiers’ families; sewing and knitting garments for hospital patients and European refugees; adopting French orphans; writing letters and keeping scrapbooks; selling war bonds and savings stamps; and nursing soldiers and civilians. Emma Gene Wensel Venn, one of several Mississippi women who served as Red Cross nurses in Europe, became the state’s only known female fatality abroad. She died in Paris in October 1918, and three years later her remains were removed from a French cemetery and reburied with full military honors in her hometown of Natchez. Venn had fallen victim to a worldwide influenza epidemic that killed far more people—perhaps one hundred million—than did the Great War itself.

Senator Vardaman, Opposed the War

The war also produced political casualties, including James K. Vardaman, one of only six U.S. senators who voted against the declaration of war. His opposition to the Wilson administration’s war policies, including the draft, fractured the forces of political reform in the state, and neither Vardaman nor Mississippi’s progressive movement ever fully recovered. In 1918 the senator was defeated for reelection by Byron “Pat” Harrison of Gulfport and Vardaman’s protégé, Theodore Bilbo, despite his support for Wilson and the war, lost his bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The war at first created economic crisis, disrupting the export markets on which the state’s two largest revenue producers, cotton and lumber, heavily depended. Eventually, however, both commodities rebounded, and Mississippi shared fully in what turned out to be a national wartime boom. Economic prosperity, coupled with military and domestic mobilization, also spawned labor shortages, aggravated in Mississippi by a steady stream of Black migration northward.

Camp Shelby, MS, Under Construction

The war heightened racial tensions. As a leading Black educator later recalled, the Black soldier “got the idea in World War I that he was a citizen, fighting for the country just as anyone else.” Patriotism at least implied citizenship, and many Black Mississippians expected wartime loyalty to yield postwar reward—if not political equality, at least some access to the ballot; if not social access, at least some semblance of the equality premised in segregation. Instead, rising Black expectations provoked White fears, especially regarding the anticipated return, as Vardaman put it, of “French-women-ruined negro soldiers.” By 1919 racial violence reached levels rarely seen since Reconstruction. Even in the U.S. Army, Blacks endured relentless discrimination. Most served in labor battalions, and every aspect of military life was strictly segregated. Black combat veterans were excluded from the Allied victory parade in Paris. A handful of Mississippi’s Black veterans lived long enough to receive belated recognition from a changed and chastened society. An assistant adjutant general of the Mississippi National Guard finally delivered Moses Hardy’s official discharge papers, along with his Victory and Occupation Medals and two service bars, in 1999, 80 years after he left the army and just after his 106th birthday.

Mississippi Aviators of the Great War Exhibit at the Mississippi Military Museum

Denied the ballot—and much else—in Mississippi, Blacks by 1917 had begun to vote with their feet. As foreign immigration fell from a record 1,200,000 in 1914 to barely 100,000 four years later, desperate northern employers abandoned a long-standing policy of racial exclusion and sent labor agents scurrying south. Thus began what scholars describe as “the largest mass migration in the history of the United States” and possibly “the most momentous internal population movement of the 20th century” anywhere.

Sources: Mississippi Encyclopedia; Mississippi History NOW, June 2005