JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
These four photos originate in one short article in the June, 1915 issue of Technical World Magazine, each a big story in themselves, and in each, in every face, another long subset of big stories. For example, the photo of the crew of the commerce raider Kronprinz Wilhelm, looking very relieved not to be sick or dead, internees in Virginia (and later POWs in Georgia) after a series of setbacks following a devastating campaign against the Allies at sea.
And a detail from the image:
And this one, this one looks like nothing but cold, a long narrow ribbon of black winding its way through a few miles of valley, from one mountain to the next, pushing through the snow to meet some sort of fate. Fighting in the cold, in the snow, in the wind, in the dark, without proper clothing, and sometimes without food, is unimaginable to me. The campaign in the Carpathians between Austria-Hungary and Russia in the winter of 1915 was the beginning of the idea of Total War in WWI, and the first major campaign in the Far Eastern Front that would eventually lead to massive chaos and some 10 million casualties. And this is what part of that looked like--a long line of soldiers, on the move, not well-equipped, to fight in massively hostile wintry conditions.
And these soldiers, with their crossbows, using them evidently to launch grenades (two antiquarian tools of war, both still very effective):
And of course, the bike corps--I've never really understood this idea. Elsewhere on the blog I've written two posts relating to soldiers and bikes (one of whom was a bike corps airborne!) and it all just seems too heavy and cumbersome to be worth the effort of struggling with the potentially life-threatening bike. And let's face it--these bikes are not specialty light-weight bikes...
Comments