The Postcard
A postally unused carte postale that was published by Huret of 15, Rue de St.-Quentin, Paris. The card, which has a divided back, was printed by Ch. Bernard of 27, Rue des Cloys, Paris.
Abba Eban
"History teaches us that men and
nations behave wisely when they
have exhausted all other alternatives".
This was said during a speech in London UK on 16th. December 1970 by Abba Eban (1915-2002), an Israeli diplomat and writer.
Visé à Paris No. 387
The reference to 'Visé à Paris' means that the image has been inspected by the military authorities in the French capital and deemed not to be a security risk.
'Visé à Paris' signifies that the card was published during or soon after the end of the Great War.
Gury
Gury is a commune in the Oise département in Northern France, in the Arrondissement of Compiègne. In 2018 the population of the village was 240.
By the Spring of 1918 the Germans had merely suspected that perhaps they might lose the war; by the beginning of August they knew that they would, and they were devastated. The end was coming.
On the 13th. August 1918 the French progressed to the north-east of Gury, gaining a footing in the park of Plessis de Roye and reaching Belval, an advance of about four miles.
By then 28,000 German prisoners, along with 500 guns and other war material, had been captured by the French First Army and the British Fourth Army since the morning of the 8th. August 1918.
The Use of Artillery in the Great War
Artillery was very heavily used by both sides during the Great War. The British fired over 170 million artillery rounds of all types, weighing more than 5 million tons - that's an average of around 70 pounds (32 kilos) per shell.
If the 170m rounds were on average two feet long, and if they were laid end to end, they would stretch for 64,394 miles (103,632 kilometres); the line would go round the equator over two and a half times. If the artillery of the Central Powers of Germany and its allies is factored in, the figure can be doubled to 5 encirclements of the planet.
During the first two weeks of the Third Battle of Ypres, over 4 million rounds were fired at a cost of over £22,000,000 - a huge sum of money, especially over a century ago.
Artillery was the killer and maimer of the war of attrition.
According to Dennis Winter's book 'Death's Men' three quarters of battle casualties were caused by artillery rounds. According to John Keegan ('The Face of Battle') casualties were:
- Bayonets - less than 1%
- Bullets - 30%
- Artillery and Bombs - 70%
Keegan suggests however that the ratio changed during advances, when massed men walking line-abreast with little protection across no-man's land were no match for for rifles and fortified machine gun emplacements.
Many artillery shells fired during the Great War failed to explode. Drake Goodman provides the following information on Flickr:
"During World War I, an estimated one tonne of explosives was fired for every square metre of territory on the Western front. As many as one in every three shells fired did not detonate. In the Ypres Salient alone, an estimated 300 million projectiles that the British and the German forces fired at each other were "duds", and most of them have not been recovered."
To this day, large quantities of Great War matériel are discovered on a regular basis. Many shells from the Great War were left buried in the mud, and often come to the surface during ploughing and land development.
For example, on the Somme battlefields in 2009 there were 1,025 interventions, unearthing over 6,000 pieces of ammunition weighing 44 tons.
Artillery shells may or may not still be live with explosive or gas, so the bomb disposal squad, of the Civilian Security of the Somme, dispose of them.
The Somme Times
From 'The Somme Times', Monday, 31 July, 1916:
'There was a young girl of the Somme,
Who sat on a number five bomb,
She thought 'twas a dud 'un,
But it went off sudden -
Her exit she made with aplomb!'