The Postcard
A postally unused carte postale that was published by Neurdein et Cie of 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 Paris No. 786
The reference to 'Visé Paris' in the bottom left of the photograph means that the image has been inspected by the military authorities in the French capital and deemed not to be a security risk.
'Visé Paris' signifies that the card was published during or soon after the end of the Great War.
Maurepas
Maurepas (French for 'Bad Meal') is a village in the Somme department of Picardie in Northern France. It is situated some 30 miles (48 km) north-east of Amiens.
Angle Wood
Angle Wood, north-west of Maurepas, used to contain a battlefield burial site created from a shell-hole. 27 British soldiers were interred there. They were mainly serving with the London Regiment when they died.
Their remains were transferred after the Great War to Delville Wood Cemetery at Longueval which is 4 km from Maurepas.
Delville Wood Cemetery
5,523 British and Commonwealth casualties are buried in the cemetery at Delville Wood, with 3,593 being unidentified. Most of the burials in the cemetery were casualties who died in the months of July, August and September during the heavy fighting of the 1916 Battle of the Somme.
'Tree Of Hope' (2001)
'Tree of Hope' is a poem that was written by by Kate Moss in 2001. She visited the site of the Battle of Delville Wood with her parents in order to retrace her grandfather's steps whilst he was serving there during the Great War. He fought in the Machine Gun Corps alongside various South African and Scottish regiments.
During the battle, Delville Wood was completely destroyed, with the exception of a single Hornbeam tree that stands there to this day.
Today the tree is surrounded by relatively young trees planted after the war ended, some seeded by acorns brought there by South Africans. Here is the poem:
'What would it say, this Hornbeam tree,
The solitary survivor of Delville Wood?
Tales of men fighting to be free?
Tales of destruction in the name of good?
From beneath its boughs what has it heard?
The agonised cries of men in pain,
Machine guns cackling their deadly word,
Shells exploding their terrorising rain.
From its many eyes what has it seen?
Men falling, plunging, to their deaths,
Lips forming lover’s names in their dying breaths,
In Delville Wood that was once so green.
Now stained with the blood of many a creed,
Mis-shapened stumps are all that remain.
Our Hornbeam watches the countryside bleed,
Reflecting the scale of humanity’s pain.
Our Hornbeam tree spreads its limbs wide,
Resisting the urge to bow down and hide.
Some good must come of this pain and mourning,
As it drinks in the life of a new day dawning.
And slowly, surely, as time goes by,
Acorns are planted, seeds are sown.
Delville Wood does death defy,
And decades thence is completely regrown.
Our Hornbeam tree has new friends and neighbours,
Bearing witness to humanity’s labours.
But its very presence ensures that no-one could
Forget what happened in Delville Wood'.
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!'
