1917 Stalemate & Revolution Part 1 Recommended reading: The Russian Revolution by Sheila Fitzpatrick ($29.95, PB) Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence ($20, PB) Lenin on the Train by Catherine Merridale ($55, HB) Wilfred Owen: A Biography by Jon Stallworthy ($38, PB) The Zimmermann Telegram by Barbara W. Tuchman ($32, PB) Ring of Steel: Germany & Austria-Hungary at War 1914–1918 by Alexander Watson, ($30, PB)
French President Raymond Poincaré called 1917, l’annné trouble—the year of confusion. After thirty months of colossal effort, both war weariness and exhaustion will take a serious toll of the belligerents. Twelve European nations are now at war. The most recent entry is Portugal on the side of the Allies on 3 January. They line up with the French, British, Italians, Russians, Japanese, Serbs, Belgians and Roumanians. The British forces include troops from Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, Canada and the West Indies. The Central Powers comprise Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey and Bulgaria. Despite the vast carnage of Verdun and the Somme the previous year, the trench lines of the Western Front are virtually unchanged. Tentative peace notes are exchanged by the combatants throughout December 1916–January 1917. These are brokered in vain by Woodrow Wilson, President of the (still neutral) United States. Peace may be wished for but the armies on all sides are still burgeoning. As 1917 opens, Russia has nine million men at arms. Germany has seven million. Austria five million. In the trenches the struggle against sniping, shelling and mud continues.
On 12 January, the poet, Second-Lieutenant Wilfred Owen, is sent forward to man an advanced dugout near Beaumont Hamel. He later writes to his mother of his ordeal: I can see no excuse for deceiving you. I have suffered seventh hell. The dugout held twenty-five men packed tight … Water filled it to a depth of 2 feet, leaving say 4 feet of air… For over fifty hours Owen’s dugout is under enemy shellfire. On the Sunday, I nearly broke down and let myself drown in the water that was now rising over my knees. Towards 6 o’clock, when, I suppose you would be going to church, the shelling grew less intense … so I was mercifully helped to do my duty and wade, crawl and flounder over No-Man’s Land to visit my other post. The sentries over the dugout were blown to nothing. Mud is the curse of the trench system. In March 1917, a French front line newspaper describes the danger: At night, the mud watches, like an enormous octopus. The victim arrives, it blinds him, closes around him, one more man gone … Men die of mud as they die from bullets, but more horribly. Mud is where men sink and where their souls sink also. Mud hides the stripes of rank, there are only poor suffering beasts. Faced with continued encirclement and an Allied naval blockade and struggling allies, German war-leaders need to knock at least one of the Allied Powers out of the war as quickly as possible to stand any chance of even a conditional victory. They decide upon a defensive strategy on the Western Front and one to eliminate Russia in the East. Between 9 February and 20 March 1917, the German High Command withdraws troops on the Western Front to a recently fortified ‘Siegfried Line’—known to the Allies as ‘The Hindenburg Line’. This reduces the front line by 25 miles (40 km) and frees up 13 divisions (150,000–200,00 men) for reserve service. In their wake, the Germans leave scorched earth devastation. Roads, railways, villages, farms are destroyed. Wells are poisoned. Large numbers of mines and booby traps are laid.
On the German home front, the ‘Turnip Winter’ of 1916–1917 is a consequence of the ever-tightening Allied blockade. Starvation is rife. In January, a Berlin observer notes: We are all gaunt and bony now … one sees faces like masks, blue with cold and drawn with hunger, with the harassed expression common to all wondering where our next meal is coming from. Famished Berliners storm the city food markets. Nebelkrähe (Hooded Crow) is now sold as meat in butcher shops. A rampant black market defies official price controls. The countryside fares little better. In Krieblowitz, near Breslau, a farmer reports: Our bread is being ‘stretched’ in every way possible, now mixed with numerous subterranean vegetables, coming under the rubric of ‘turnip’, of whose existence we never dreamed before. On 19 January 1917, as Germany moves to intensify the war at sea, Alfred von Zimmermann, the new German Foreign Minister, sends a secret coded telegram to the German Ambassador to Mexico, Heinrich von Eckardt. In it is outlined a plan whereby, following the outbreak of war between the United States and Germany— provoked by Germany’s declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare—Mexico should be offered a military alliance with Germany. Supported with financial aid. Mexico would then ‘reconquer’ territories lost seventy years earlier: Arizona, New Mexico, Texas. The Kaiser orders unrestricted submarine warfare commence on 1 February 1917. Any foreign ship is to be sunk on sight. Two days later, the United States severs diplomatic relations with Germany—but President Wilson does not declare war.
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The sensationally reckless ‘Zimmermann Telegram’ is intercepted and decoded by British intelligence and published in the United States on 1 March 1917. In the Middle East, the Turkish Empire is defending itself from an Arab nationalist revolt—and T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) who in January–February 1917 leads a series of successful raids capturing Turkish-held towns on the Red Sea coast.
In March 1917, Tsarist Russia descends into the turmoil of revolution. Food riots and strikes break out in the capital, Petrograd. Army mutinies begin. Tsar Nicholas II leaves Petrograd for his Military Headquarters at Mogilev in Belarus to quell them. Worker, Soldier and Peasant ‘Soviets’ are established in Petrograd and seize control of the Winter Palace. On 11 March, Mikhail Rodzianko, President of the Russian Duma (Parliament) telegraphs the Tsar: Position serious. Anarchy in capital. Government paralysed. Transport, supply and fuel in complete disorder. Troops firing on each other. Essential formation of new government. There must be no delay. On 15 March 1917, Tsar Nicholas II, Ruler of Russia since 1894 abdicates. A Provisional Government is established, led by Prince Georgy Lvov. Eight days later, desperate to sow further confusion in Russia, a German intrigue commences, with the Imperial Minister in Bern, Switzerland, dispatching a telegram notifying the Foreign Ministry that certain ‘Russian revolutionaries’—chief among them Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the notorious Bolshevik extremist—at present safely in exile in Switzerland: wish to return to Russia via Germany... Since it is in our interests to allow the radical wing of the revolutionaries to prevail, it would seem to me advisable to allow transit. The Foreign Ministry replies on 25 March 1917: No objection to transit of Russian revolutionaries if effected on special train with reliable escort.’ To be continued next month. Stephen Reid
Poetry
Float by Anne Carson ($40, BX) In this beautifully designed box, there are 12 individual booklets that can be read in any order—you can begin with Carson puzzling through Proust on a frozen Icelandic plain, in the art-saturated enclaves of downtown NYC, or atop Mount Olympus as Zeus ponders his afterlife. There is a three-woman chorus of Gertrude Steins embodying an essay about ‘falling’, and an investigation of monogamy & marriage as she anticipates the perfect egg her husband is cooking for breakfast. Falling Ill: Last Poems by C K Williams ($41, HB) Over the past half century, the great shape-shifting poet C. K. Williams took upon himself the poet’s task: to record with candour & ardour the burden of being alive. In this, his final volume of poems, he brings this task to its conclusion, bearing witness to a restless mind’s encounter with the brute fact of the body’s decay, the spirit’s erasure—these brave poems face unflinchingly the dreadful edge of a precipice where a futureless future stares back.
In Praise of Defeat by Abdellatif Laabi
Banned by the Moroccan government, Abdellatif Laabi’s poetry is increasingly influential on the international scene and spans six decades of political & literary change, innovation & struggle. Including a wide range of work, from piercing domestic love poetry to a fierce lyricism of social resistance informed by nearly a decade spent in prison for ‘crimes of opinion’, all of Laabi’s poetry is situated firmly against tyranny & for life—an almost mythic sense of spiritual & earthly joy emanates from this resistance through the darkness of political oppression. ($33, PB)
House of Lords & Commons by Ishion Hutchinson ($33, HB)
Jamaican poet holds his world in full focus but at an astonishing angle: from the violence of the 17th century English Civil War as refracted through a mythic sea wanderer, right down to the dark interior of love. With ears tuned to the vernacular, the collection vividly binds us to what is terrifying about happiness, loss, and the lure of the sea.