The Great War - 1914-1918

Walter Hinteler wrote:

It weren't "young German voluteers" either, but unqualified older volunteers of the 44th, 45th, and 46th Reserve Infantry Division.

My maternal grandfather somehow had avoided to conscripted during before the war. (He was a "National Liberal").

In 1914, aged 25, after a short medic training, he became medic in the 4th company of a reserve battalion within in the 98th Infantry Regiment.

On the morning of 11 November the Prussian Guard attacked British troops along the Menin Road. Thirteen battalions of them came on, but only in three places did the Prussian Guard break through. On the following morning FitzClarence counter-attacked. The General himself decided to show his old regiment the way, and paid for the decision with his life. FitzClarence fell dead, and neither FitzClarence himself, nor Sir John French knew how well he had served his country at Gheluvelt.

In his Despatch of 20 November 1914, Sir John French said: "Another officer whose name was particularly mentioned to me was Brigadier-General FitzClarence, VC, commanding the 1st Guards' Brigade. He was unfortunately killed in the night attack of the 11th November. His loss will be severely felt".

He was killed in action, aged 49, at Polygon Wood, Zonnebeke, Belgium, on 12 November 1914 whilst commanding the 1st Guards Brigade.
He is the highest-ranking officer inscribed on the Menin Gate Memorial in Ypres, commemorating those with no known grave.

...a whole generation gone

The First World War ended on this very day 96 years ago with the the Armistice of Compiègne.

At the beginning of November 1914, the Ottoman Empire, the world's greatest independent Islamic power, abandoned its ambivalent neutrality towards the warring parties, and became a belligerent in the conflict, with the sultan declaring a military jihad (holy war) against France, Russia and Great Britain.

The Ottoman Empire had recently been humiliated by setbacks in Libya and the Balkans. Participation in what had begun as a European war might seem to outside observers, therefore, to have been suicidal, but key elements in the government, impressed by German industrial and military power and motivated by dreams of imperial glory, greeted the expanding war as an opportunity to regain lost territories and incorporate new lands and nationalities into the empire.

The Ottoman/Turkish army (some 600,000 troops divided into 38 divisions) was of an unknown quality. But with Germany as an ally, the Ottoman Empire represented a serious threat to the British Empire, so in a pre-emptive strike, London immediately landed an Anglo-Indian force at Basra, near the estuary of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. This was done to protect the Anglo-Persian oil pipeline, which was vital to the British navy, and to show the Union Jack in this strategically important area in the Persian Gulf.

No; I think they have published a great deal less than we have. But I do not want to go into that. It is a perfectly sound principle that we must have regard to what they think are their interests, just as much as to what we think are ours. We must go side by side with them, and although I quite agree that, from the point of view of recruiting, in which, of course, I have special and direct interest, it is very desirable indeed that we should have 30 those full, I was almost going to say full-blooded descriptions, with which the old special correspondents used to furnish us in wars gone by—special adventures and heroic achievements of this or that regiment in this or that stricken field. But when you are dealing with a war which extends over a front of a hundred, or even two hundred miles, with a multiplication of scientific developments, the telephone, the telegraph, and other means of communication, and everything you publish becomes the common property of the world, and therefore the property of your enemy, the obligations of reticence are far greater than they ever were before, and the field for this descriptive writing, admirable in its way, and a great incentive and a stimulus to patriotic feeling, is a field which is necessarily more curtailed than ever it was before. We all regret it, but we must accept it as one of the conditions under which we carry on this fight.