We see battle after battle, all around the world, and yet no side can achieve victory.
The millions of men fighting are obviously affected by the war each day, but unlike earlier
wars, this war is total war and it also deeply affects every one of the people back home.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
Last week the world was stunned by a spontaneous revolution in Russia that toppled the Tsar
and then saw two rival factions vying for control.
British and Indian forces occupied Baghdad, a real blow to the Ottoman Empire, and in
the Balkans Austrian and Bulgarian forces began counter attacking the Toplice Rebellion.
Here’s what followed.
The British continued advancing in the Middle East, taking Fallujah, Deltawa, and Sindia,
and also spent most of the week advancing in the west.
In fact, from the 17th to the 19th the British and French took 170 villages on the western
Front, including Bapaume, as the Germans abandoned the line from Andechy to Oise, which they’d
held for two years, and retreated to their Hindenburg Line.
The French were also advancing in Macedonia, capturing a mile of Bulgarian trenches and
1,200 prisoners North of Monastir the 18th and a few days later finally manage to free
Monastir, the current Serbian capital, from daily shelling.
And what of France’s huge ally, Russia?
The new Provisional government announced that Russia would remain in the war, but there
were - as I said - two rival centers of government.
Prince Lvov, the new Prime Minister, urged active participation in the war, but in response,
the Petrograd Soviet appointed political commissars to all military units.
Their main task was to urge soldiers not to fight.
Also, in order to try to fix the constant shortage of food and supplies to the army,
all men over 43 years old were released from duty, shrinking the size of the army.
On the 22nd, Great Britain, France, the US, Romania, Switzerland, and Italy recognized
the provisional government of Russia.
The leadership of its army was uncertain, though, as this week the appointment of Grand
Duke Nikolai as commander in chief was annulled.
But there was a lot going on on other home fronts too.
Barrow-in-Furness lies on the west coast of England up near the Lake District and is a
fairly sleepy place, but during the war it was a major supplier of both ships and munitions
for Britain, thanks to the Vickers factory there.
Since they set up shop there in 1897, Vickers had never really had a smooth relationship
with the workforce, but things were in overdrive by now.
There wasn’t enough housing for the workers so living standards had seriously fallen,
inflation was rampant, workers were expected to work longer hours, and there were even
tribunals to discipline those who were late or were seen as slackers.
Since munitions fell under the Defense of the Realm Act, punishments could be heavy.
Last June the workers had gone on strike to protest the “dilution” of labor, with
unskilled workers operating machines that had been for specialists earlier.
That strike lasted a week, but you could see that another walkout was kind of inevitable.
And it came on March 21st, 1917 when workers protested the managers’ refusal to honor
a bonus scheme they had for finishing jobs on time, and against the arrest of union officials
in Manchester and Sheffield.
Soon, in Parliament, MPs were asking why the ministry of munitions isn’t doing more to
help the women in Barrow who lost their jobs because the men went on strike.
You got this conversation between an MP and the Secretary of the Ministry of Munitions:
MP: “Is the Honourable Member aware that many of these women... have come as far as
Belfast... and they are no more responsible for what has now happened than if there had
been a breakdown of machinery, and are the women going to be stranded and neither the
company nor the Ministry accept responsibility for them?”
Secretary: “We should be creating a very severe precedent indeed if the government,
whenever a certain number of people were thrown out of employment as a result of the action
of another body of workpeople, were to relieve them of their distress.”
MP: “I would like to ask whether these are the same women who the Honourable Member himself
said the other day had saved England during the crisis?”
Two weeks from now, the government announces that it would take action unless work started
again, including lifetime prison sentences for the strike leaders.
Work resumed, though there would be another strike in May for the same reason and the
government would not address the causes of the strike, but at least built new housing
estates, which actually did settle things down.
Something else happened this week away from the front, and it would have repercussions
down the line.
Okay, Karl had been Austro-Hungarian emperor for only a few months and two things about
him: he was at least interested in peace, and he didn’t feel that Austria should always
act in concert with and subordinate to Germany, right?
His wife was Zita of Bourbon-Parma.
Her older brother was Sixtus, Prince of Bourbon-Parma.
Sixtus and his brother Xavier had joined the Belgian army when the war broke out.
They wanted to defend France but as members of a ruling house could not be French officers,
so they joined the Belgians.
Back in January, one or both of them had met their mother in Switzerland, and she had given
them a letter from Emperor Karl that detailed his willingness to make a separate peace between
Austria-Hungary and the Entente.
The princes agreed to the basic allied requirements for such a peace; Alsace-Lorraine returned
to the French, Belgium and Serbia restored as independent nations, and Constantinople
goes to Russia.
Karl wrote a letter on March 17th in which he generally agreed to these terms and it
was sent through Prince Sixtus to British King George and Prime Minister Lloyd George,
and French President Poincaré and Prime Minister Briand.
On March 23rd, Sixtus and Xavier met with Karl and Austrian Foreign Minister Count Czernin
to continue negotiations.
Karl wrote a letter that stated that he supported French claims to Alsace-Lorraine.
However, also back on the 17th, Briand and his cabinet had resigned in France, and Alexandre
Ribot replaced him.
Ribot had no real interest in a separate peace with Austria.
And none of these letters mentioned Italy anyhow, which was a pretty major component
of Austria’s war.
And Italy had already said that in any peace a bunch of Austrian territory must go to Italy.
So next month Lloyd George and Poincaré meet with Italian Foreign Minister Sonnino and
Prime Minister Orlando.
Now, the former two did not tell the latter about Karl’s correspondence, but asked how
Italy felt about lowering its demands.
The answer was a big fat no, which is odd because it seems the Italians didn’t know
that Italian Army Chief of Staff Luigi Cadorna had, around now and apparently acting on orders
of the Italian King, let Austria know that though Italy still wanted the Trentino, they
were prepared to lower their demands.
Now, all of this was still secret; I’m just saying it now because it happened now and
will come back to seriously haunt Karl in the future.
But it was naïve to expect otherwise.
I mean, what he was doing was basically sending out feelers for abandoning his main ally Germany,
and even the territory he was willing to give up in France and Belgium, yeah, that was currently
held by the Germans, it’s no real loss to him who has it.
He wasn’t giving up a whole lot of his empire.
We’ll see this explode in the future.
If Karl was thinking about getting out of the war, one country was thinking about joining
it.
They might not have much of a choice, as the German submarine assaults continued.
On the 18th, three American ships were sunk, and on the 23rd another.
U.S. President Woodrow Wilson met with his cabinet and asked their opinion.
To a man, they wanted war with Germany.
Also this week, the French battleship Danton was torpedoed in the Mediterranean with 296
lives lost, and the British hospital ship Asturias was torpedoed off the British coast
without warning and managed to run aground instead of sinking.
31 people were killed.
And that was the week, Allied advances in the west, the Balkans, and the Middle East,
uncertainty in Russia, civilian deaths at sea, a munitions strike in Britain, and a
naïve emperor betraying his ally.
Well, you gotta call it that, right?
I mean, even though there was basically zero chance of that peace happening, it’s still
pretty serious.
What would Germany say when they found out?
German casualties for the war up to the end of February (Chronology) are reported at 4,148,163.
Over four million men killed, wounded, or just plain missing, and let’s not forget
the starvation conditions now at home in Germany.
And Karl wanted to propose an unacceptable separate peace?
For a war that his empire initially declared?
That’s pretty stupid.
But what can you expect?
If you want to learn more about Karl’s predecessor,
Franz Joseph I, you can click right here for that.
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