Nineteen sixteen
My great grandfather always used to say you could never trust a Frenchman, though he tended to be a bit courser than that after five pints. Bloody frogs, he would shout, stinking runaway cowards. Of course, being five or six at the time, I never really understood what he meant, just that he thought all Frenchmen cowards. I suppose it is only really now that I get his sentiments, my own dad allowing me access to his grandfather's war diaries. Pages January first nineteen sixteen through to July twenty ninth read like it was all a great game, even in the spring mud and exploding shells. July thirtieth, well even the thickest kid in my history class knows about July thirtieth nineteen sixteen.
What the hell just happened? One minute we're on alert, expecting a bosch barrage, the next, Freddie is running down the line as fast as his bleedin' legs will carry him to the Captain. He only fucking goes and tells him that the Bosch has rolled up the frogs at Verdun. Fuck. Next thing we know the whole bloody regiment is stood to by the next runner down the line. The whole fucking night we stood there. Fucking freezing.
Tucked inside the back cover was a picture of his company, black and white smiles with grim looks behind the eyes. On the back the date scrawled in teenage handwriting, last of the likely lads, 2nd company 1st West Yorkshire, 02.10.1916. I must have stared at that image for hours, trying to fathom what they must have been thinking. Of course Britain had technically not been beaten, hell the ceasefire was only two days old, but even so, how must the boys in France been feeling? Mr Bates showed us the grainy silent film of the signing of the peace treaty between Germany and the Entente, of musty old men standing around waiting for something to happy in a train carriage. He also showed us the 1957 Hollywood version, Decimation, with Kurt Douglas in the lead role. That shook me up as a fifteen year old, seeing what by all accounts was a genuine portrayal of the French flight from the heights of Verdun in the early summer of nineteen sixteen.
“Too much has happened. Someone's got to be hurt. The only question is who. General Joffre's assault on the Ant Hill failed. His order to fire on his own troops was refused. But his attempt to murder three innocent men to protect his own reputation will be prevented by the General Staff. No matter the outcome of this war, this court martial is a stain on the honour of France. It is the General Staff who should be on trial, not these men!”
In a later lesson he showed us in a graph that would come back time and time again in my research the cost to the French army of loosing Verdun. Unlike in nineteen fourteen, when the French had heroically stood their ground eighteen miles short of Paris, in the summer of nineteen sixteen the French Army did not simply have the willpower to stand against the German advance. The graph showed the staggering number of Frenchmen who either deserted or surrendered en mass to the Germans without firing a shot. A second graph, far more brutal than simple numbers, showed the French high command's crackdown. Decimation of every regiment that mutinied, in the literal sense. Over ten thousand soldiers died in seven days of purges, which only stopped when orders came down from Paris to halt the bloodshed in the face of the swiftness of the German advance. Jacques Mordal left an indelible mark on me with his bloody history of nineteen sixteen when I read it at university.
Somewhere in the fields of Chattancourt and Esnes France lost her honour. Unlike Sedan, where the Emperor surrendered with as much grace as he could muster, Joffre panicked and turned on his own men to hide his shame. Such was the barbarity of his subsistent actions that it was a wonder there was a sane man left in the whole French army. As for those who mutinied in the face of such actions, posterity has not judged them too harshly.
In my teenage eyes I never understood why the French ran, surely one last stand would have drained the impetus from the German assault. That was before I read Eric Hobsbawm's comments:
I have never tried to diminish the appalling things that happened in France, though the sheer extent of the massacres we didn't realise. In the early days we knew a new world was being born amid blood and tears and horror: revolution, civil war, famine—we knew of the Burgundian famine of the early '20s, if not the early '30s. Thanks to the breakdown of the western front, we had the illusion that even this brutal, experimental, system had to work better. The French soldiers at Verdun lost faith in their senior officers, who's callousness and disregard led to the breakdown of order. Burgundy was the end result.
What was also later revealed when the British government unsealed its war records in 1956 was how close the British had come to launching an offensive on the Somme in July nineteen sixteen. Most military historians since believed that such an assault would only have delayed the inevitable, and by not launching that offensive, which would have happened in August nineteen sixteen if General Hague had his way, the British ensured they had enough troops ready to prevent a total German victory on the western front. Gilbert Frankau would immortalise those uncertain days in his book A Still Wind Blows.
Raging tommys, all of us, stood up, stood down, fear running through us as electric as the summer thunderstorms raging overhead. Not one bullet fired in anger at the enemy, knowing in our hearts we could have stopped the rot. Damn them was the watch words of the day, damn the French for being spineless in the face of danger. Now look at us, stood down one last time. Are we the cowards?
The more I read of his work, the more I felt the anger of the common solder. The French had stabbed us in the back, or so it seemed at the time, yet by some small miracle the Germans did not have enough fight left in them to truly finish things off. As with earlier wars, it was the unglamourous affairs of supplies that found the Germans out. That, and the death of Crown Prince Wilhelm on the morning of September eighth at the hands of a French sniper. They called it the shot that broke a million hearts, such was the effect it had on the German people. While the French were in disarray, their enemy mourned, the sting taken out of their tale. When it became clear to the German high command that they would probably run out of supplies forty or fifty miles short of Paris, they looked for options to extricate themselves in an honourable fashion. Max Hastings put it better than most.
The front is no longer measured by meters but by corpses. Southern France is no longer countryside. By day it is an enormous cloud of burning, blinding smoke; it is a vast furnace lit by the reflection of the flames. And when night arrives, one of those scorching howling bleeding nights, the dogs plunge into the rivers and swim desperately to gain the other bank away from the German advance. The nights in France are a terror for them. Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure, but for not much longer.
A large folio of images was collected after the war and civil war finished, and dad gave me a copy of it to me for my nineteenth birthday. Utter devastation ran from the Isle de France down to the Mediterranean, it was little wonder that France fell apart in the face of such barbarity. The Italian airship pilot who flew the balloon with the photographer refused to land when asked to, even though two years on from the worst of the atrocities. He knew the part his countrymen had played in the last days of the war, reigning terror on southern France with a lightening Italian raid for land before any treaty could be signed. Then there was the recriminations. Burgundian vice-president Marcel Cashin recalled them in his memoirs published in 1949.
There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. Proust had it right. Many things in 1916 were unpleasant, but they had to be done. We could not simply allow the France that we wished to build fall into the hands of those who wished to destroy it. Part of me regrets our actions, but for the greater good they were necessary.
Another photograph in the diary shows my great grandfather with a tricoolour burning. On closer inspection I found it to be a tricolour of the French socialists who he was sent to fight after the ceasefire was signed. In a move of sheer desperation the French government signed a white peace with the French, conceding that all territory won in 1871 would remain forever German, recognising the right of the German government to exercise control over current held territory until it was stabilised, and finally agreeing to annul their treaty with Russia. His passage for ninth October was short and to the point.
What fucking joke. French soldiers streamed past us on the way to their internment, sorriest sons of bitches I ever saw. Glad to be back somewhere warm, Mabel's letter arrived, and glad to see she's safe, though given state of things don't know when I'll see her next.
Beneath the diary was his scrap book, which gave me a fuller understanding of his life around this time. On my first visit to Paris I made sure to visit the Louvre, as one of the souvenirs he kept was a flyer for the triumphant return of King Phillipe VIII on the twentieth October nineteen sixteen. With the embers of civil war fermenting in the south of the country, and the third republic collapsing in on itself with one final vote of no confidence on the sixteenth October, the King saw it as the right moment to step in and take control of the situation. Historians have argued ever since if this was the right move, as many theorised that it was the singular even that pushed the socialists and communists in the south to formally break with what they saw as a reactionary threat to the whole Republic. John Lewis Gaddis made clear the prevailing view during my time at university.
In many respects Phillipe saved France. Without him it would have been likely that France would have become a rump state at the mercy of both Germany and Britain, but the cost was too much in many eyes. The break away of the Burgundian Soviet Socialist Republic in October 1916 was the start point sixty years of communist dominion over the body politic of Europe. Even the Germans, while celebrating their victory, had no stomach for a guerilla war in a devastated land. With merely a sop to the nationalists in their own governments, the Germans and British fought a containing war into the weary dregs of 1917, with only the threat of famine and blockade bringing the communists to the table. Their demand for a Republican France were met with silence from the new masters in Paris, and I wonder to this day what would have been the outcome had Philipe allowed himself to become a mere President. On such decisions history is made.
While it was tempting to try to get a visa to visit the BSSR prior to the Provence spring, I had to content myself with my research into its inception. Provence, the Rhone, Franche-Comte, half of Bourgogne, and a small part of Auvergne formed the core of the BSSR, with Marseille the de facto, and later official, capital. Best on all sides by enemies, the leadership fought what came to be recognised as one of the defining guerilla campaigns of the twentieth century. A faded cloth flag in the scrap book shows the patch given to British soldiers fighting for the Bourbon French forces, nicknamed the whites, and next to it my great grandfather pinned a note.
I damned well earned this fighting those commie bastards. If those frogs had fought half as well against the Bosch we would not have been slogging our guts out chasing shadows.
When I finally did manage to visit Marseille, I made sure to get my picture next to the iconic statue of Leon Trotsky, whose inspirational leadership of the red faction during the war was a beacon to all leftists in the years to come. No-one knows for sure when he returned to Burgundy from Spain in the tail end of nineteen sixteen, but most autobiographers believe it was around the time of the Italian advance on Nice in early November. Robert Service's seminal autobiography recounts the Burgundian reaction to Trotsky's tactics.
At first they were horrified, nothing they had seen in the last two years of war could tally with what he was proposing, scorched earth, retaliation, barbaric treatment of those who would not aid them. But it worked. It was the right approach at the right moment. A lesser man would have baulked at the idea of what needed to be done, but in the face of the White armies rapid advances, Trotsky's was the only plan that could work. And it did. Ninety years on, and the Burgundian Republic owes its very existence to Trotsky. To put it into perspective, I strongly believe that if the Red army in Russia had been led by Trotsky, it would have put the Monarchist forces to flight.
Marseille was not what I expected. This was the place that for the three months to the end of nineteen sixteen, and the beginning of the year after the world held its breath over. I expected to see brutalist buildings, propaganda to the worker, statues to Marx, yet all I found was a gentle mix of French sensibility and experimental twentieth century architecture. The one glaring item missing from the downfall of the BSSR was the imposing hammer and sickle motifs which dominated the front of most public buildings as shown in most books and magazines. On my my second to last day in the city I spent a few hours in the massive war cemetery on the edge of the city. I had been to the ones on the Somme a year earlier, and expected much the same, but here things were different. Unlike the singular cemeteries for each nation in the rest of France, here every soldier was buried as equals, with only a national flag on his tombstone to mark any obvious difference. German next to French next to Italian next to British next to Australian. So many names, so many stones. On the central memorial at the heart of the cemetery, there was a bitter inscription.
Here lie the remains of those who have no name, who fought and died in the hope that freedom would spread what ever its shade or hue in 1916 and 1917. May they rest in peace in the hope that their lives will shine as a beacon to the generations.
Knowing what came next, I shook my head in frustration. Nineteen sixteen saw the end of the western war, and the end of my great grandfather's diary, but nineteen seventeen saw a whole new level of barbarity on the other side of the continent.
Nineteen seventeen
By the time I got to university, there were only a handful of British survivors of the Great War alive. Harry Patch, who I never got to interview, gave this poignant quote near to the end of his life.
When the war ended, I don't know if I was more relieved that we'd won or that I didn't have to go back. Nice was a disastrous battle, thousands and thousands of young lives were lost. It makes me angry. Earlier this year, I went back to Marseilles to shake the hand of Maurice Bernard, Burgundy's only surviving veteran from the war. It was emotional. He is 107. We've had 87 years to think what war is. To me, it's a licence to go out and murder. Why should the British government call me up and take me out to a battlefield to shoot a man I never knew, whose language I couldn't speak? All those lives lost for a war finished over a table. Now what is the sense in that?
Tears filled my eyes as I wandered the cemetery until the sun began to set over the Cote-D'azur. Most of the graves were from the early part of nineteen seventeen, many Germans and Italian. I knew somewhere in amongst them was my great grandfather's brother, Colin, a runner with the 1st Yorkshire, and just before the cemetery closed I found the headstone. My camera only had a few shots left on it, so I made sure to get a good on for my personal album, and I was sure dad would appreciate it. Colin barely got a mention in our family, probably because he was killed before he could marry his sweetheart and have children, but I was able to dig up the mention in dispatches he received for his actions leading up to his death.
Private Thwaits advanced forward of our position to establish where the enemy was positioned on the ridge above St-Laurent-du-Var. Spotting a machine gun nest around the next bend, with great haste he made his way back to my command post, only to be hit by enemy fire as he fell back. With great fortitude he returned to me, delivered his message, though unfortunately succumbed to his wounds shortly there after.
The irony of this was that he was killed days before the British led a general withdrawal back into Nice due to the enemy action in the area. Many have suggested that it was the second Irish uprising in as many years that finally got the British out of France, but personally I think it had more to do with the desire to be done with a bloody war that had no chance of victory. In my great grandfather's scrap book I found his pass home, stamped eighth May nineteen seventeen. As luck would have it, the next day he met my great grandmother at a clearing station in Calais. She was a nurse on her way home on leave, and on the train back up to London something must have clicked as they began courting shortly afterwards. A pile of their letters from before their marriage was tucked under the scrap book. May twenty fifth was a classic example of her understatement when she was sent back to France.
My Darling,
I know that you will be gone for several more weeks, and I curse both the reds and our own Generals for keeping you from me. Since we met my heart has been all aflutter, and knowing that you are safe in England gives me hope that there will be good at the end of this wretched state of affairs I am sure when I return you will keep your promise and take me to Leeds to meet your folks, but in the mean time keep safe.
All my love.
Dr Matthews, my modern history tutor at university, kept making the point that women's suffrage gained more traction from the nurses treating the wounded of Europe than from all the girls turned out in the fields to provide food for a weary nation. I was on the fence, as it was clear that Lloyd George would need extra support in order to remain in power given the down turn in his popularity after the white peace. With many soldiers able to return to work, women grumbled at the lack of opportunity they now faced, and my great grandmother was one of them. Her diary betrayed her anxiety at returning home to a Britain changed by a brutal war.
Everywhere I go in the camp I hear rumours of malcontent, and today I even heard a group of soldiers taking in sympathy for the Reds. Can you believe it? What chance is there for me if the Reds come? I've had my fill of their idea of equality after tending to the wounds of a group of refugees who fled the fighting. The stories they tell are positively shocking.
A postcard in the back of her diary got my attention as it showed Nice before the war. My great grandfather did not speak of what happened over the three months of street fighting that the Reds brought upon the city, but the list of names carved in stone on the city's war memorial was a sobering moment. More German, Italian, French, British, Canadian, and Australian names, and while I have only ever been to Nice once, this was the one memory that stayed with me. Thousands and thousands of names. Too many really to take in, on a scale to rival those in Ypres. In god awful symmetry the first names were listed on twenty first February nineteen seventeen, a year exactly since the battle for Verdun began. Like the cemetery in Marseilles, all names were listed irrespective of nationality, only in the date they fell. One day above all others had the longest list of names, May third nineteen seventeen. The German commander, General Max von Gallwitz, summed it up best in his biography.
Even the worst of the Galician fighting could not prepare me for the spectacle that was the horror of Nice. Give me the wide open plains of the east any day than the accursed Reds and their snipes. May 19th still haunts me, as I should have listened to Mangin and pulled back sooner to the city limits. Never has there been such combat in an urban area in modern times, and if it were not for the fact that we were the last bulwark between the Reds and the test of Europe I would have pulled the whole damn lot of us back sooner. As it was, while I believe with all my heart that we will have to finish the communists off sooner rather than later, it is with a heavy heart that I agree that the Kaiser was right in signing an agreement with the Burgundians to end hostilities.
Not many Germans, Italians, French, or British agreed with his stance at the time, and given the way the wind blew afterwards I doubt there would be much room for agreement even now. Despite my desire to visit the Burgundian Republic after the Provence spring, I knew deep down that this was still a country which suppressed decent, though how much stock I put into all the horror stories I was not sure. One thing was certain, though, and that was the rise of Trotsky to the top of the BSSR. While he was never President or vice-president, his made sure he kept an iron grip on power. Pierre Palmade was expelled from the BSSR ten years ago for cracking a joke about Trotsky.
Trotsky walks into the meeting room and turns to his trusted staff, "I want you to organise the execution of 10,000 Whites and 1 kitten."
Everyone looks around the table and after a long silence, Jaures pipes up, "General, why do you want to kill a kitten?"
Trotsky smiles and turns to the rest of the table, "You see, no one cares about the Whites."
My heart skipped a beat when I entered Italy for the first time, and saw the large memorial to the lost a hundred metres down the road. Every text book I read at school shows the exact same picture, the site of the biggest refugee camp Europe had ever seen, and a place where tales of the Red's retributions against anyone disloyal came to the fore. Fully twenty million people lived in the BSSR at the end of hostilities, many refugees, and while the Nationalist's propaganda significantly inflated the figure, my research indicated fully five hundred thousand people died or were imprisoned during the Red terror. My great grandmother helped deal with many of the victims who passed through her clearing station on their way into the new Kingdom of France. Her last letter home before she returned for good gave a sense at her despair.
Dearest,
You know my heart grows heavy for you, and the last three months have been a real burden on my soul. Only yesterday was I called upon to look after three orphaned girls who's father and three brothers had been shot by the communists. The look in their eyes when I told them their mother had died the night before broke my heart. What has the world come to when we are leaving children without their parents?
I hope you are safe and well, and that I am able to return home before your next posting.
Yours always.
My great grandmother was witnessing first hand the start of the next big threat to Europe, Burgundian Influenza. The summer of nineteen seventeen saw the heaviest fighting on the eastern front as the Germans massed their whole army to defeat the Russians. Unlike the French, who had at least given the Germans a good defence for two years, the Russians were put to flight in less than six months of concerted fighting after the withdrawal from Burgundy. Simon Sharma, in his epic history of the British Empire, gave this indictment to the flu.
The seething mass of refugees spread out across Europe after the two treaties were signed, ending up in camps huddled together against the bitterest winter in memory. The camps became a breeding ground for disease, and somewhere on the edge of the BSSR, the Burgundian Flu mutated into existence. Its arrival in Britain via returning troops who gave aid to the refugees was at first un-noticed, but by the end of nineteen seventeen over four hundred thousand people had fallen sick, with mainly the fit and healthy being the worst effected. By the time it died back in the spring of nineteen eighteen, more people had died from disease than had been killed in the two years of war.
My travel through the Kingdom of Italy brought me to more memorials, shrines to the dead, and to the ghost town of Vallebona nestled in the hills above the Italian/Burgundian border. In my guidebook it sums the town up with a few lines.
Prior to the Great War, Vallebona was a bustling village with a rich history of growing fresh produce sold in the markets at towns nearby. During the Burgundian war of 1916/17 the village was raided numerous times by communist forces, leaving many of the men dead. The outbreak of Burgundian flu at the refugee camp near the border infected the village, and many of the remaining inhabitants left in order to get treatment and sanctuary. Only the sick and infirm remained, and due to the high death rate due to malnutrition no villager returned after the flu retreated. The village was left in its current state as a memorial to all those who died in Italy.
As I walked through the well tended empty streets, I stumbled upon the Kingdom of France's memorial to the departed. Many of my fellow students in my third year French history class were of the opinion that King Phillipe was the biggest idiot of the twentieth century, and I was loathe to disagree, but touches like this memorial, which he personally unveiled in nineteen twenty, made me believe that he was not just the bystander as the chaos of Europe unfolded around him. Ramsay Weston Phipps commented during his research into the Napoleonic wars that Phillipe's deft touch with the Generals of France was much the same as Napoleon's with his Marshals.
I am convinced that while King Phillipe will go down in history under a cloud of controversy due to his actions in 1916, it is clear from his dealings with the army that his has a deft touch. To bring order to the chaos that was the last days of the Republic, to stop the army from outright mutinying and joining the Communists, and then to set up a stable country in the rump that was France is testament to his strength of will. I doubt Napoleon would have been able to do much better given the circumstances.
Much research has been carried out into the King's role on what occurred in Vienna towards the end of Nineteen Seventeen, but given that it was a French secret service agent who stopped the assassination of the Austrian Emperor it is doubtful the King was kept out of the loop. I spent most of my second year at university wading through letters from Austrian soldiers trying to get a grip on their feelings for my second year major work, though my rusty German made for some interesting mistranslations. There seemed to have been a sincere belief that with the defeat of Russia and France that Austria would go back to being the dominant force in southern Europe. In a letter released in 1970 from the Papal archives at his beatification, Emperor Charles I writes of his fervent belief that God's grace has prevailed in the war.
To his holiness the Pope Benedictus Quintus Decimus,
It is with deepest humility that We give praise to the Lord God in heaven for saving Our great nation from the turmoils of the recent war. We ask, holy father, that you intercede on Our behalf for the safe deliverance through the struggles that are surely ahead, lest Our faith be seen as weak and wavering. We also ask that you bless Us in our current tribulations, and keep Us from straying from the path of rightousness.
Your eternal servent,
Not that the various political factions within his empire paid his faith any attention. He had barely been the on the throne six months when the Hungarian parliament demanded further concessions from him, which set off a domino effect among the rest of the ethnic groups within the Empire. The letters from Austian troops in demarcation camps change tone from happiness at going home, to fear and loathing of the central government. In Berlin the Kaiser was still in mourning for his son, leaving the German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg to steer the ship of state. Combined with the punitive treaty signed by the Russian government sparking unrest in the Ukraine and Poland, all it took was one spark to cause the Austo-Hungarian, German, and Russian governments to fall. John De Coucey gave a scathing remark on the match that sparked a central European implosion.
If you had asked any man in the street in October 1916 which side had won the war the answer was obviously Germany, come January 1918 the answer was far less certain. If any one man has to pinpointed for bringing down the central powers, Michael Collins would be high on my list. His meeting with Prince Joachim of Prussia in November 1917 was tantamount to a renewal of hostilities between Britain and Germany, as Britain could hardly stand idally by and watch a German prince take over the crown of Ireland. How much stock you put in how credible this offer actually was is a moot point, as the end result was a British refusal to get involved in restoring order in central Europe. I have long contended that had that meeting not take place at that precise point, then the face of European history, if not global history, would have been different. If but for the want of a horse.
My Great Grandfather was not demobilised in nineteen seventeen unlike most of his pals. His regiment was sent to Ireland in the October to deal with the fermenting troubles, with home rule very much on the table in parliament. A photograph of the bombed out post office building was stuck grimly along side a stub for The Bad Boy, a Robert Harror flick he briefly mentioned in his diary as the first film he has seen in a good while. His time in Ireland was brief due to his regiment being recalled to France to serve on the border when the balloon went up following the assassination attempt on Charles I, and the Austro-Hungarian army split into competing factions for control of the country. The history books tell that British interests in the Mediterranean were threatened by the chaos sweeping the Balkens, and eger to avoid any rogue elements gaining control of Greece or the Agean, they sent a fleet to Malta. What they don't tell is just on how much a knife edge Britain was from plunging back into a pan-European war. Churchill wrote to the Prime Minster pushing for a counter to any Red threat to the established order.
I implore that you bring to the House's attention the need to deploy troops to protect not only our national interests, but the interests of wider freedom. Surely the communist threat is too great to ignore, the demands of liberty a clarion call to answer in our neighbours time of need. You have seen the reports of Trotsky sending agents to Vienna, the French King stepping to prevent the attack being a success, but those same agents have infiltrated the Austrian army in alarming numbers. Let our troops do more than watch, otherwise we will have another Burgundy on our hands.
No-one in London had all the facts, and I sincerely doubt anyone involved had the whole picture. My travels through Italy brought me to Milan, and face-to-face with another war memorial marked with the names of those who gave their lives. This time they were given in defense of liberty, Italian blood spilt protecting the refugees of the worst crisis to hit Europe since the French revolution. Archbishop of Canterbury Randall Davidson gave an emotional plea during his Christmas day service.
I implore all good Christians no matter what creed to heed the words of the Lord, and turn swords into plow shares. For too long the people of Europe have suffered, and in this time of crisis strong moral leadership is required. Let us be Christlike in our humility, charitable in our hearts, and show mercy to those who have agreived us. Let the Lord show us the way, and let the leaders of all nations come together and build a lasting peace. This we pray.
My arrival at the Austrian border was met with trepidation on my part. For all the bloody battles on the western front, even the purges carried out in Burgundy, the scholar inside of me ached at the thought of what occurred in the lands across the borders a hundred years ago. What disease, famine, and depredation did not wipe out, the ethnic cleansing of vast areas of the Austo-Hungarian empire did. Not all rumours are false, but for once I wish that the rumours that started to come out of Austria-Hungary in last days of nineteen seventeen were false. History, of course, would prove them right, and as I drove into Austria I let myself cry at the thought of all the horrific stories I have read of the Austro-Hungarian war.
My great grandfather always used to say you could never trust a Frenchman, though he tended to be a bit courser than that after five pints. Bloody frogs, he would shout, stinking runaway cowards. Of course, being five or six at the time, I never really understood what he meant, just that he thought all Frenchmen cowards. I suppose it is only really now that I get his sentiments, my own dad allowing me access to his grandfather's war diaries. Pages January first nineteen sixteen through to July twenty ninth read like it was all a great game, even in the spring mud and exploding shells. July thirtieth, well even the thickest kid in my history class knows about July thirtieth nineteen sixteen.
What the hell just happened? One minute we're on alert, expecting a bosch barrage, the next, Freddie is running down the line as fast as his bleedin' legs will carry him to the Captain. He only fucking goes and tells him that the Bosch has rolled up the frogs at Verdun. Fuck. Next thing we know the whole bloody regiment is stood to by the next runner down the line. The whole fucking night we stood there. Fucking freezing.
Tucked inside the back cover was a picture of his company, black and white smiles with grim looks behind the eyes. On the back the date scrawled in teenage handwriting, last of the likely lads, 2nd company 1st West Yorkshire, 02.10.1916. I must have stared at that image for hours, trying to fathom what they must have been thinking. Of course Britain had technically not been beaten, hell the ceasefire was only two days old, but even so, how must the boys in France been feeling? Mr Bates showed us the grainy silent film of the signing of the peace treaty between Germany and the Entente, of musty old men standing around waiting for something to happy in a train carriage. He also showed us the 1957 Hollywood version, Decimation, with Kurt Douglas in the lead role. That shook me up as a fifteen year old, seeing what by all accounts was a genuine portrayal of the French flight from the heights of Verdun in the early summer of nineteen sixteen.
“Too much has happened. Someone's got to be hurt. The only question is who. General Joffre's assault on the Ant Hill failed. His order to fire on his own troops was refused. But his attempt to murder three innocent men to protect his own reputation will be prevented by the General Staff. No matter the outcome of this war, this court martial is a stain on the honour of France. It is the General Staff who should be on trial, not these men!”
In a later lesson he showed us in a graph that would come back time and time again in my research the cost to the French army of loosing Verdun. Unlike in nineteen fourteen, when the French had heroically stood their ground eighteen miles short of Paris, in the summer of nineteen sixteen the French Army did not simply have the willpower to stand against the German advance. The graph showed the staggering number of Frenchmen who either deserted or surrendered en mass to the Germans without firing a shot. A second graph, far more brutal than simple numbers, showed the French high command's crackdown. Decimation of every regiment that mutinied, in the literal sense. Over ten thousand soldiers died in seven days of purges, which only stopped when orders came down from Paris to halt the bloodshed in the face of the swiftness of the German advance. Jacques Mordal left an indelible mark on me with his bloody history of nineteen sixteen when I read it at university.
Somewhere in the fields of Chattancourt and Esnes France lost her honour. Unlike Sedan, where the Emperor surrendered with as much grace as he could muster, Joffre panicked and turned on his own men to hide his shame. Such was the barbarity of his subsistent actions that it was a wonder there was a sane man left in the whole French army. As for those who mutinied in the face of such actions, posterity has not judged them too harshly.
In my teenage eyes I never understood why the French ran, surely one last stand would have drained the impetus from the German assault. That was before I read Eric Hobsbawm's comments:
I have never tried to diminish the appalling things that happened in France, though the sheer extent of the massacres we didn't realise. In the early days we knew a new world was being born amid blood and tears and horror: revolution, civil war, famine—we knew of the Burgundian famine of the early '20s, if not the early '30s. Thanks to the breakdown of the western front, we had the illusion that even this brutal, experimental, system had to work better. The French soldiers at Verdun lost faith in their senior officers, who's callousness and disregard led to the breakdown of order. Burgundy was the end result.
What was also later revealed when the British government unsealed its war records in 1956 was how close the British had come to launching an offensive on the Somme in July nineteen sixteen. Most military historians since believed that such an assault would only have delayed the inevitable, and by not launching that offensive, which would have happened in August nineteen sixteen if General Hague had his way, the British ensured they had enough troops ready to prevent a total German victory on the western front. Gilbert Frankau would immortalise those uncertain days in his book A Still Wind Blows.
Raging tommys, all of us, stood up, stood down, fear running through us as electric as the summer thunderstorms raging overhead. Not one bullet fired in anger at the enemy, knowing in our hearts we could have stopped the rot. Damn them was the watch words of the day, damn the French for being spineless in the face of danger. Now look at us, stood down one last time. Are we the cowards?
The more I read of his work, the more I felt the anger of the common solder. The French had stabbed us in the back, or so it seemed at the time, yet by some small miracle the Germans did not have enough fight left in them to truly finish things off. As with earlier wars, it was the unglamourous affairs of supplies that found the Germans out. That, and the death of Crown Prince Wilhelm on the morning of September eighth at the hands of a French sniper. They called it the shot that broke a million hearts, such was the effect it had on the German people. While the French were in disarray, their enemy mourned, the sting taken out of their tale. When it became clear to the German high command that they would probably run out of supplies forty or fifty miles short of Paris, they looked for options to extricate themselves in an honourable fashion. Max Hastings put it better than most.
The front is no longer measured by meters but by corpses. Southern France is no longer countryside. By day it is an enormous cloud of burning, blinding smoke; it is a vast furnace lit by the reflection of the flames. And when night arrives, one of those scorching howling bleeding nights, the dogs plunge into the rivers and swim desperately to gain the other bank away from the German advance. The nights in France are a terror for them. Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure, but for not much longer.
A large folio of images was collected after the war and civil war finished, and dad gave me a copy of it to me for my nineteenth birthday. Utter devastation ran from the Isle de France down to the Mediterranean, it was little wonder that France fell apart in the face of such barbarity. The Italian airship pilot who flew the balloon with the photographer refused to land when asked to, even though two years on from the worst of the atrocities. He knew the part his countrymen had played in the last days of the war, reigning terror on southern France with a lightening Italian raid for land before any treaty could be signed. Then there was the recriminations. Burgundian vice-president Marcel Cashin recalled them in his memoirs published in 1949.
There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. Proust had it right. Many things in 1916 were unpleasant, but they had to be done. We could not simply allow the France that we wished to build fall into the hands of those who wished to destroy it. Part of me regrets our actions, but for the greater good they were necessary.
Another photograph in the diary shows my great grandfather with a tricoolour burning. On closer inspection I found it to be a tricolour of the French socialists who he was sent to fight after the ceasefire was signed. In a move of sheer desperation the French government signed a white peace with the French, conceding that all territory won in 1871 would remain forever German, recognising the right of the German government to exercise control over current held territory until it was stabilised, and finally agreeing to annul their treaty with Russia. His passage for ninth October was short and to the point.
What fucking joke. French soldiers streamed past us on the way to their internment, sorriest sons of bitches I ever saw. Glad to be back somewhere warm, Mabel's letter arrived, and glad to see she's safe, though given state of things don't know when I'll see her next.
Beneath the diary was his scrap book, which gave me a fuller understanding of his life around this time. On my first visit to Paris I made sure to visit the Louvre, as one of the souvenirs he kept was a flyer for the triumphant return of King Phillipe VIII on the twentieth October nineteen sixteen. With the embers of civil war fermenting in the south of the country, and the third republic collapsing in on itself with one final vote of no confidence on the sixteenth October, the King saw it as the right moment to step in and take control of the situation. Historians have argued ever since if this was the right move, as many theorised that it was the singular even that pushed the socialists and communists in the south to formally break with what they saw as a reactionary threat to the whole Republic. John Lewis Gaddis made clear the prevailing view during my time at university.
In many respects Phillipe saved France. Without him it would have been likely that France would have become a rump state at the mercy of both Germany and Britain, but the cost was too much in many eyes. The break away of the Burgundian Soviet Socialist Republic in October 1916 was the start point sixty years of communist dominion over the body politic of Europe. Even the Germans, while celebrating their victory, had no stomach for a guerilla war in a devastated land. With merely a sop to the nationalists in their own governments, the Germans and British fought a containing war into the weary dregs of 1917, with only the threat of famine and blockade bringing the communists to the table. Their demand for a Republican France were met with silence from the new masters in Paris, and I wonder to this day what would have been the outcome had Philipe allowed himself to become a mere President. On such decisions history is made.
While it was tempting to try to get a visa to visit the BSSR prior to the Provence spring, I had to content myself with my research into its inception. Provence, the Rhone, Franche-Comte, half of Bourgogne, and a small part of Auvergne formed the core of the BSSR, with Marseille the de facto, and later official, capital. Best on all sides by enemies, the leadership fought what came to be recognised as one of the defining guerilla campaigns of the twentieth century. A faded cloth flag in the scrap book shows the patch given to British soldiers fighting for the Bourbon French forces, nicknamed the whites, and next to it my great grandfather pinned a note.
I damned well earned this fighting those commie bastards. If those frogs had fought half as well against the Bosch we would not have been slogging our guts out chasing shadows.
When I finally did manage to visit Marseille, I made sure to get my picture next to the iconic statue of Leon Trotsky, whose inspirational leadership of the red faction during the war was a beacon to all leftists in the years to come. No-one knows for sure when he returned to Burgundy from Spain in the tail end of nineteen sixteen, but most autobiographers believe it was around the time of the Italian advance on Nice in early November. Robert Service's seminal autobiography recounts the Burgundian reaction to Trotsky's tactics.
At first they were horrified, nothing they had seen in the last two years of war could tally with what he was proposing, scorched earth, retaliation, barbaric treatment of those who would not aid them. But it worked. It was the right approach at the right moment. A lesser man would have baulked at the idea of what needed to be done, but in the face of the White armies rapid advances, Trotsky's was the only plan that could work. And it did. Ninety years on, and the Burgundian Republic owes its very existence to Trotsky. To put it into perspective, I strongly believe that if the Red army in Russia had been led by Trotsky, it would have put the Monarchist forces to flight.
Marseille was not what I expected. This was the place that for the three months to the end of nineteen sixteen, and the beginning of the year after the world held its breath over. I expected to see brutalist buildings, propaganda to the worker, statues to Marx, yet all I found was a gentle mix of French sensibility and experimental twentieth century architecture. The one glaring item missing from the downfall of the BSSR was the imposing hammer and sickle motifs which dominated the front of most public buildings as shown in most books and magazines. On my my second to last day in the city I spent a few hours in the massive war cemetery on the edge of the city. I had been to the ones on the Somme a year earlier, and expected much the same, but here things were different. Unlike the singular cemeteries for each nation in the rest of France, here every soldier was buried as equals, with only a national flag on his tombstone to mark any obvious difference. German next to French next to Italian next to British next to Australian. So many names, so many stones. On the central memorial at the heart of the cemetery, there was a bitter inscription.
Here lie the remains of those who have no name, who fought and died in the hope that freedom would spread what ever its shade or hue in 1916 and 1917. May they rest in peace in the hope that their lives will shine as a beacon to the generations.
Knowing what came next, I shook my head in frustration. Nineteen sixteen saw the end of the western war, and the end of my great grandfather's diary, but nineteen seventeen saw a whole new level of barbarity on the other side of the continent.
Nineteen seventeen
By the time I got to university, there were only a handful of British survivors of the Great War alive. Harry Patch, who I never got to interview, gave this poignant quote near to the end of his life.
When the war ended, I don't know if I was more relieved that we'd won or that I didn't have to go back. Nice was a disastrous battle, thousands and thousands of young lives were lost. It makes me angry. Earlier this year, I went back to Marseilles to shake the hand of Maurice Bernard, Burgundy's only surviving veteran from the war. It was emotional. He is 107. We've had 87 years to think what war is. To me, it's a licence to go out and murder. Why should the British government call me up and take me out to a battlefield to shoot a man I never knew, whose language I couldn't speak? All those lives lost for a war finished over a table. Now what is the sense in that?
Tears filled my eyes as I wandered the cemetery until the sun began to set over the Cote-D'azur. Most of the graves were from the early part of nineteen seventeen, many Germans and Italian. I knew somewhere in amongst them was my great grandfather's brother, Colin, a runner with the 1st Yorkshire, and just before the cemetery closed I found the headstone. My camera only had a few shots left on it, so I made sure to get a good on for my personal album, and I was sure dad would appreciate it. Colin barely got a mention in our family, probably because he was killed before he could marry his sweetheart and have children, but I was able to dig up the mention in dispatches he received for his actions leading up to his death.
Private Thwaits advanced forward of our position to establish where the enemy was positioned on the ridge above St-Laurent-du-Var. Spotting a machine gun nest around the next bend, with great haste he made his way back to my command post, only to be hit by enemy fire as he fell back. With great fortitude he returned to me, delivered his message, though unfortunately succumbed to his wounds shortly there after.
The irony of this was that he was killed days before the British led a general withdrawal back into Nice due to the enemy action in the area. Many have suggested that it was the second Irish uprising in as many years that finally got the British out of France, but personally I think it had more to do with the desire to be done with a bloody war that had no chance of victory. In my great grandfather's scrap book I found his pass home, stamped eighth May nineteen seventeen. As luck would have it, the next day he met my great grandmother at a clearing station in Calais. She was a nurse on her way home on leave, and on the train back up to London something must have clicked as they began courting shortly afterwards. A pile of their letters from before their marriage was tucked under the scrap book. May twenty fifth was a classic example of her understatement when she was sent back to France.
My Darling,
I know that you will be gone for several more weeks, and I curse both the reds and our own Generals for keeping you from me. Since we met my heart has been all aflutter, and knowing that you are safe in England gives me hope that there will be good at the end of this wretched state of affairs I am sure when I return you will keep your promise and take me to Leeds to meet your folks, but in the mean time keep safe.
All my love.
Dr Matthews, my modern history tutor at university, kept making the point that women's suffrage gained more traction from the nurses treating the wounded of Europe than from all the girls turned out in the fields to provide food for a weary nation. I was on the fence, as it was clear that Lloyd George would need extra support in order to remain in power given the down turn in his popularity after the white peace. With many soldiers able to return to work, women grumbled at the lack of opportunity they now faced, and my great grandmother was one of them. Her diary betrayed her anxiety at returning home to a Britain changed by a brutal war.
Everywhere I go in the camp I hear rumours of malcontent, and today I even heard a group of soldiers taking in sympathy for the Reds. Can you believe it? What chance is there for me if the Reds come? I've had my fill of their idea of equality after tending to the wounds of a group of refugees who fled the fighting. The stories they tell are positively shocking.
A postcard in the back of her diary got my attention as it showed Nice before the war. My great grandfather did not speak of what happened over the three months of street fighting that the Reds brought upon the city, but the list of names carved in stone on the city's war memorial was a sobering moment. More German, Italian, French, British, Canadian, and Australian names, and while I have only ever been to Nice once, this was the one memory that stayed with me. Thousands and thousands of names. Too many really to take in, on a scale to rival those in Ypres. In god awful symmetry the first names were listed on twenty first February nineteen seventeen, a year exactly since the battle for Verdun began. Like the cemetery in Marseilles, all names were listed irrespective of nationality, only in the date they fell. One day above all others had the longest list of names, May third nineteen seventeen. The German commander, General Max von Gallwitz, summed it up best in his biography.
Even the worst of the Galician fighting could not prepare me for the spectacle that was the horror of Nice. Give me the wide open plains of the east any day than the accursed Reds and their snipes. May 19th still haunts me, as I should have listened to Mangin and pulled back sooner to the city limits. Never has there been such combat in an urban area in modern times, and if it were not for the fact that we were the last bulwark between the Reds and the test of Europe I would have pulled the whole damn lot of us back sooner. As it was, while I believe with all my heart that we will have to finish the communists off sooner rather than later, it is with a heavy heart that I agree that the Kaiser was right in signing an agreement with the Burgundians to end hostilities.
Not many Germans, Italians, French, or British agreed with his stance at the time, and given the way the wind blew afterwards I doubt there would be much room for agreement even now. Despite my desire to visit the Burgundian Republic after the Provence spring, I knew deep down that this was still a country which suppressed decent, though how much stock I put into all the horror stories I was not sure. One thing was certain, though, and that was the rise of Trotsky to the top of the BSSR. While he was never President or vice-president, his made sure he kept an iron grip on power. Pierre Palmade was expelled from the BSSR ten years ago for cracking a joke about Trotsky.
Trotsky walks into the meeting room and turns to his trusted staff, "I want you to organise the execution of 10,000 Whites and 1 kitten."
Everyone looks around the table and after a long silence, Jaures pipes up, "General, why do you want to kill a kitten?"
Trotsky smiles and turns to the rest of the table, "You see, no one cares about the Whites."
My heart skipped a beat when I entered Italy for the first time, and saw the large memorial to the lost a hundred metres down the road. Every text book I read at school shows the exact same picture, the site of the biggest refugee camp Europe had ever seen, and a place where tales of the Red's retributions against anyone disloyal came to the fore. Fully twenty million people lived in the BSSR at the end of hostilities, many refugees, and while the Nationalist's propaganda significantly inflated the figure, my research indicated fully five hundred thousand people died or were imprisoned during the Red terror. My great grandmother helped deal with many of the victims who passed through her clearing station on their way into the new Kingdom of France. Her last letter home before she returned for good gave a sense at her despair.
Dearest,
You know my heart grows heavy for you, and the last three months have been a real burden on my soul. Only yesterday was I called upon to look after three orphaned girls who's father and three brothers had been shot by the communists. The look in their eyes when I told them their mother had died the night before broke my heart. What has the world come to when we are leaving children without their parents?
I hope you are safe and well, and that I am able to return home before your next posting.
Yours always.
My great grandmother was witnessing first hand the start of the next big threat to Europe, Burgundian Influenza. The summer of nineteen seventeen saw the heaviest fighting on the eastern front as the Germans massed their whole army to defeat the Russians. Unlike the French, who had at least given the Germans a good defence for two years, the Russians were put to flight in less than six months of concerted fighting after the withdrawal from Burgundy. Simon Sharma, in his epic history of the British Empire, gave this indictment to the flu.
The seething mass of refugees spread out across Europe after the two treaties were signed, ending up in camps huddled together against the bitterest winter in memory. The camps became a breeding ground for disease, and somewhere on the edge of the BSSR, the Burgundian Flu mutated into existence. Its arrival in Britain via returning troops who gave aid to the refugees was at first un-noticed, but by the end of nineteen seventeen over four hundred thousand people had fallen sick, with mainly the fit and healthy being the worst effected. By the time it died back in the spring of nineteen eighteen, more people had died from disease than had been killed in the two years of war.
My travel through the Kingdom of Italy brought me to more memorials, shrines to the dead, and to the ghost town of Vallebona nestled in the hills above the Italian/Burgundian border. In my guidebook it sums the town up with a few lines.
Prior to the Great War, Vallebona was a bustling village with a rich history of growing fresh produce sold in the markets at towns nearby. During the Burgundian war of 1916/17 the village was raided numerous times by communist forces, leaving many of the men dead. The outbreak of Burgundian flu at the refugee camp near the border infected the village, and many of the remaining inhabitants left in order to get treatment and sanctuary. Only the sick and infirm remained, and due to the high death rate due to malnutrition no villager returned after the flu retreated. The village was left in its current state as a memorial to all those who died in Italy.
As I walked through the well tended empty streets, I stumbled upon the Kingdom of France's memorial to the departed. Many of my fellow students in my third year French history class were of the opinion that King Phillipe was the biggest idiot of the twentieth century, and I was loathe to disagree, but touches like this memorial, which he personally unveiled in nineteen twenty, made me believe that he was not just the bystander as the chaos of Europe unfolded around him. Ramsay Weston Phipps commented during his research into the Napoleonic wars that Phillipe's deft touch with the Generals of France was much the same as Napoleon's with his Marshals.
I am convinced that while King Phillipe will go down in history under a cloud of controversy due to his actions in 1916, it is clear from his dealings with the army that his has a deft touch. To bring order to the chaos that was the last days of the Republic, to stop the army from outright mutinying and joining the Communists, and then to set up a stable country in the rump that was France is testament to his strength of will. I doubt Napoleon would have been able to do much better given the circumstances.
Much research has been carried out into the King's role on what occurred in Vienna towards the end of Nineteen Seventeen, but given that it was a French secret service agent who stopped the assassination of the Austrian Emperor it is doubtful the King was kept out of the loop. I spent most of my second year at university wading through letters from Austrian soldiers trying to get a grip on their feelings for my second year major work, though my rusty German made for some interesting mistranslations. There seemed to have been a sincere belief that with the defeat of Russia and France that Austria would go back to being the dominant force in southern Europe. In a letter released in 1970 from the Papal archives at his beatification, Emperor Charles I writes of his fervent belief that God's grace has prevailed in the war.
To his holiness the Pope Benedictus Quintus Decimus,
It is with deepest humility that We give praise to the Lord God in heaven for saving Our great nation from the turmoils of the recent war. We ask, holy father, that you intercede on Our behalf for the safe deliverance through the struggles that are surely ahead, lest Our faith be seen as weak and wavering. We also ask that you bless Us in our current tribulations, and keep Us from straying from the path of rightousness.
Your eternal servent,
Not that the various political factions within his empire paid his faith any attention. He had barely been the on the throne six months when the Hungarian parliament demanded further concessions from him, which set off a domino effect among the rest of the ethnic groups within the Empire. The letters from Austian troops in demarcation camps change tone from happiness at going home, to fear and loathing of the central government. In Berlin the Kaiser was still in mourning for his son, leaving the German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg to steer the ship of state. Combined with the punitive treaty signed by the Russian government sparking unrest in the Ukraine and Poland, all it took was one spark to cause the Austo-Hungarian, German, and Russian governments to fall. John De Coucey gave a scathing remark on the match that sparked a central European implosion.
If you had asked any man in the street in October 1916 which side had won the war the answer was obviously Germany, come January 1918 the answer was far less certain. If any one man has to pinpointed for bringing down the central powers, Michael Collins would be high on my list. His meeting with Prince Joachim of Prussia in November 1917 was tantamount to a renewal of hostilities between Britain and Germany, as Britain could hardly stand idally by and watch a German prince take over the crown of Ireland. How much stock you put in how credible this offer actually was is a moot point, as the end result was a British refusal to get involved in restoring order in central Europe. I have long contended that had that meeting not take place at that precise point, then the face of European history, if not global history, would have been different. If but for the want of a horse.
My Great Grandfather was not demobilised in nineteen seventeen unlike most of his pals. His regiment was sent to Ireland in the October to deal with the fermenting troubles, with home rule very much on the table in parliament. A photograph of the bombed out post office building was stuck grimly along side a stub for The Bad Boy, a Robert Harror flick he briefly mentioned in his diary as the first film he has seen in a good while. His time in Ireland was brief due to his regiment being recalled to France to serve on the border when the balloon went up following the assassination attempt on Charles I, and the Austro-Hungarian army split into competing factions for control of the country. The history books tell that British interests in the Mediterranean were threatened by the chaos sweeping the Balkens, and eger to avoid any rogue elements gaining control of Greece or the Agean, they sent a fleet to Malta. What they don't tell is just on how much a knife edge Britain was from plunging back into a pan-European war. Churchill wrote to the Prime Minster pushing for a counter to any Red threat to the established order.
I implore that you bring to the House's attention the need to deploy troops to protect not only our national interests, but the interests of wider freedom. Surely the communist threat is too great to ignore, the demands of liberty a clarion call to answer in our neighbours time of need. You have seen the reports of Trotsky sending agents to Vienna, the French King stepping to prevent the attack being a success, but those same agents have infiltrated the Austrian army in alarming numbers. Let our troops do more than watch, otherwise we will have another Burgundy on our hands.
No-one in London had all the facts, and I sincerely doubt anyone involved had the whole picture. My travels through Italy brought me to Milan, and face-to-face with another war memorial marked with the names of those who gave their lives. This time they were given in defense of liberty, Italian blood spilt protecting the refugees of the worst crisis to hit Europe since the French revolution. Archbishop of Canterbury Randall Davidson gave an emotional plea during his Christmas day service.
I implore all good Christians no matter what creed to heed the words of the Lord, and turn swords into plow shares. For too long the people of Europe have suffered, and in this time of crisis strong moral leadership is required. Let us be Christlike in our humility, charitable in our hearts, and show mercy to those who have agreived us. Let the Lord show us the way, and let the leaders of all nations come together and build a lasting peace. This we pray.
My arrival at the Austrian border was met with trepidation on my part. For all the bloody battles on the western front, even the purges carried out in Burgundy, the scholar inside of me ached at the thought of what occurred in the lands across the borders a hundred years ago. What disease, famine, and depredation did not wipe out, the ethnic cleansing of vast areas of the Austo-Hungarian empire did. Not all rumours are false, but for once I wish that the rumours that started to come out of Austria-Hungary in last days of nineteen seventeen were false. History, of course, would prove them right, and as I drove into Austria I let myself cry at the thought of all the horrific stories I have read of the Austro-Hungarian war.