First World War: German Army trench.
Source: El Eco Franciscano, May 15, 1915, page 300.
Colorization: Hotpot.
Author: Eduardo Freire Canosa
Author: Eduardo Freire Canosa
July 25, 1914. Austria declares war on Serbia. Austro-Hungarian troops occupy Belgrade.
July 28. Russia petitions Austria for a temporary halt to the hostilities.
July 29. The unofficial mobilization of troops in the countries of the Triple Alliance and those of the Entente gathers pace.
July 31. Germany hands an ultimatum to both Russia and France and declares a state of war inside the country.
August 1. Germany declares war on Russia. France orders a general mobilization of its Army. Skirmishes begin on Germany's frontier with Russia and with France.
(El Progreso, diario independiente de Pontevedra, page 1. Thursday August 20, 1914)
What besets Europe is a convulsion without precedent if we sideline the barbarian invasions. When did in the Median Wars or in Pompey's military campaigns or in the Crusades of East and West twenty million soldiers ever clash and who, provisioned with various machines of destruction, went on to obliterate and destroy one another?
According to statistical estimates 3% of all troops embroiled in a battle perish. Thus if the European war should finally break out, more than 600,000 servicemen would die. To speak now about creeks full of blood, about carmine waves, would not be fantasy literature or the lyrical utterance of a poet.
And where would there be enough hospitals to tend so much punctured flesh, so many wounded soldiers?
Even before the start of the tragic bloody clashes the mere mobilization of the reservists would deprive more than eight million households of their breadwinner: he would exit across the threshold and let the spectres of orphanhood and famine enter.
Farm and factory would lose the labour force that makes them productive. The marketplace and the retail store that sustain the farm and the factory would close because of a slump in production. The cost of living would soar horribly for everyone.
The economic setup of public and private companies induces the average citizen to invest a portion of his savings in bonds and shares of the big firms. Equity depreciations and insolvent companies would bankrupt the entrepreneurs and stigmatize Government bonds with a junk rating, and a surge of misery would wipe out many millions of households that put their modest vital capital in public securities.
Nobody in Europe or around the world would avoid getting splashed. To say otherwise is asinine. Economic conflicts resemble storms on the high seas. However small, their waves fetch their fury to the most deserted shores: if one day the British Parliament were to raise the tariff on sugar slightly, it would ruin England's bakers and the Continent's sugar industry also.
And now ponder what economic cataclysms an European war would generate and what terrible repercussions it would wreak on capitalists, workers and countless consumers. Think next about the social upheavals which the peoples of war-ravaged countries would give themselves over to: the unwelcome stir in their burrows of the worms hatched inside this dazzling Europe, the end of life's pulse, science and art, of the incipient social restructuring, contractual peace, normal course of justice and of everything that signifies a pathway of civilization.
I believe that such a war would yield no victors, only vanquished. Countries would be left exhausted, destitute, annihilated. Europe would forfeit its global markets and its hegemony and give both to America perhaps forever. The savings of fifty years would turn to smoke and scrap iron; a mad dumping of money to the bottom of the sea.
I am merely sketching on these quarto sheets a vague omen of the catastrophe.
A few days ago the Cabildo of Madrid received a document from a certain monk belonging to the monastic community of Mount Athos. The addresses on the envelope were written in German, the letter in Russian and certain passages of the Apocalypse in Greek.
The monk informed the "Catholic Consistory of Madrid" that the Antichrist was being reared near Jerusalem and that he would make his public appearance in 1917. The Chapter read the strange letter with a dab of aristocratic irony;—but the monk who undersigned the message dwells next to the place where the bombs that will make Europe explode were being loaded.2
He is probably a Russian who has seen the tragic destructive passion unhinging the Slavs.3
He may be forgiven a tad. After all, at few other times has the world been as spooked to obsess with the apocalyptic predictions.
And yet the magnitude of the foreseen horrors provides some hope for peace. I fail to see how those responsible for the horrors can bear the crushing load of their responsibility nor do I grasp what motives can they adduce before their own conscience and before history.
Chauvinist passions are insane-asylum tantrums when viewed against that pyre of desolations.
SEVERINO AZNAR.
G. E. Rasputin visited Mount Athos twice. He first went there in 1902 with his uncle, Dmitry Ivanovich Pecherkin [...] Dmitry Ivanovich remained on Athos as a worker, and in 1905 he was accepted as a novice into the Russian Panteleimon Monastery. Grigory Efimovich went to Athos another time in 1911 during his nearly four-month pilgrimage. There he met again with his relative, who had by then taken monastic vows with the name Daniel.(Sergey V. Fomin: The Spirit-Filled Wanderer, Part 14. LiveJournal. August 18, 2015, 12:18 PM)
The importance of Mount Athos to Russian Orthodoxy is highlighted by the following quotation from this webpage of the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society commemorating the one-thousandth anniversary in the year 2015 of the presence of Russian monks on Mount Athos,
Interestingly, Dmitry Vasilyevich Zubov and Vitaly Vasilyevich Kostygov have uncovered connections between Russian and Athonite monasteries over the centuries. A vast 3-D network, encompassing all of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Athos. What was the connection between them? It turns out that a material and spiritual connection permeated Russia to a degree we couldn't even imagine. It was enormously influential! There wasn't a single Russian monastery where no one had visited Athos. Someone was sure to have gone there on pilgrimage. When we compiled this network, we saw that it was a two-way street: on one side, spiritual light radiated from Athos, and on the other, donations travelled from the Russian monasteries to Athos. Books and icons arrived in Russia from Athos, Russian money flowed to Athos. Athos primarily exuded spirituality; in return Russia donated funds to Athos because the life of the monks there was of course difficult (robbers, bandits).
Consequently it is not far-fetched to suppose that Rasputin may have visited Mount Athos more frequently than heretofore thought, especially after Rasputin's uncle Dmitry Ivanovich became a novice in 1905 at the Russian Panteleimon Monastery of Mount Athos.
Indeed some Russian sources cite pilgrimages by Rasputin in other years: 1893, 1903.
The photograph above right comes from this Russian webpage. Unfortunately no date is provided for the photograph. The monk sitting next to Rasputin is probably his uncle.
August 2, 1914. The Germans invade Luxembourg.
August 3. Germany invades Belgium. Germany declares war on France and issues an ultimatum to Belgium.
August 4. England declares war on Germany.
August 5. The Germans shell Liège and invade Dutch territory.
August 6. Germany steps up its siege of Liège. Austria declares war on Russia.
August 7. Russia launches an offensive.
August 8. Several French divisions enter Belgium to succour Liège. The Serbs repulse the Austrians.
August 9. French troops occupy some German cities. Isolated naval battles between Britain and Germany.
August 10. The Germans are defeated at Geinelle (Belgian Luxembourg). The French press their advance.
In just eighteen days unmindful complacent Europe—her heads of State or Government on vacation, her soldiers demobilized and her fleets dispersed—has crossed the threshold from the delights of peace to the frightful horrors of war.
(El Progreso, diario independiente de Pontevedra, page 1. Thursday August 20, 1914)
Prominent philosophers like Renan, great military geniuses like Moltke, cultured generals and eminent publicists like Von Bernhardi, and many other enthusiasts and choristers of those grand doctors of international repute have intoned their hymns to war and have very formally submitted that whereas war is a social neccesity and the springboard of material progress, a state of perpetual peace is immoral, subverts the rights of man and portends the retrogression of society and its relapse to brutishness.
Despite what those illustrious scholars affirm—hallucinations from our point of view—beholding today the horrendous spectacle cultured Europe offers to us; hearing the apocalyptic thunder of that clash whose sinister roll resounds over the entire orb; faced with the formidable booming of thousands of field guns whose shells pregnant with shrapnel overspread seas and land with corpses and palpitating limbs; before the recurrent acts of barbarity, brutality and savagery committed in this twentieth century...the plea of morality and material progress sounds sarcastic, and a snort of disgust and bitterness limns the philosopher's visage.
A most cultured Europe, enviable and envied continent, fittingly dubbed fertile engine of progress, lovely venue of modern academe, today flails in dreadful titanic fits of agony, the result of a false concept of law and the reckless pursuit of dominion, imperialism and greatness.
Millions of combatants tear each other to pieces with the frenzy of voracious beasts, strewing the scorched ground with their blood, and amid the yowls, bawls, blasphemies and groans of the wounded and of the dying is audible the loud voice of the commanders who, like evil genii, press to the fight, drunken with rage, keen to avenge, filled with an unquenchable thirst for destruction and requital.
Decomposing corpses unburied on open fields, bloodied bowels and putrid pieces of flesh floating on the seas, gutted ruins of historic cities, temples and educational institutions...this is the doleful and macabre picture which the nations that dispute the title of "most civilized" offer to us. O sarcasm!
Might is right and strong peoples have the right to conquer weak ones; pacifism is fatuity, immorality, an opprobrious stain on the human race; war is a biological necessity, a phase in the fight for the existence and survival of the fittest; weak peoples don't own a right to life;—can more marvelous tommyrot be said in fewer words?
General Von Bernhardi the head of the German hawks has said all this in a famous book which echoed far and wide and which became an appalling best-seller in the remainder of nations that deem themselves strong.
O ghastly lapse of moral and philosophical acumen!
Might is tyranny, and tyranny entails contemning and violating the true law.
Law is the essential, the substantial parameter; it is the moral and philosophical rule of conduct guided by reason and conscience whereas might is merely accidental, a requisite factor, a bulwark raised to uphold the shared law. The empire of armed force is brutal, inhumane; the empire of law is our desideratum.
And since war is the most graphic evidence of the assertiveness of armed force, can it be considered an acceptable ideal or the attendant and indispensable component of material progress? How outrageous!
War is the scourge of humanity; it is a delirium in whose paroxysms all kinds of abominable crimes are committed and which leaves in its wake many other no-less-lamentable calamities.
Yet today the modern authors of treatises backing and advocating the human slaughter allege in their defense that they are endeavouring to make all aspects of war more humane, that it is presently waged in less hideous and tragic fashion than obtained in past epochs of savagery and ignorance. Sophism! Vain drivel of soulless imperialists who bridle everything to their ambition and satanic hubris, slighting humanity and trampling the rule of law brutally and scandalously.
War can not in any sense be made more humane because it is intrinsically immoral and evil, and whatever is by essence and specific nature irrepressibly evil can not be rehabilitated no matter how much effort men devote to the task.
Humanize war? Who ponders such a thing?
Raising the lethat power of weaponry; inventing explosives of horrendous expansive force, turning the countryside and the city into theaters of war, so too the accessible regions of the atmosphere, the depths and surface of the sea, the monumental city, the temples and institutions of learning... What a fine way of making war more scientific and humane!
No, a thousand times no: War whose outcome breeds death can not be humanized or made less loathsome.
Whether someone convicted by law is executed via the guillotine, garrote vil, firing squad or electric chair the act will always be to deprive a man of the life that only HE who gave it has the right to reclaim, and all the instituted legal sanctions invoked by the sentence do not exonerate the act from the charge of assassination, viewed from a moral and philosophical optic.
The science of Medicine and its associated disciplines devote themselves heroically to protect and better life, but lo! comes war with its train of calamities and erases in a jiffy the secular and most commendable toil of the sage hero!
Yet wars will doubtlessly cease. The instinct of preservation will unwind the miracle without metaphysical controversies, and the hifalutin names of Caesar, Alexander, Pyrrhus, Attila, Alaric, Napoleon and humanity's other executioners who spilled torrents of blood will very soon perhaps be cursed and detested, and in their stead we will erect deep in our heart a monument to the memory of the wise men.
Between the two greatnesses defined by Campoamor—between the crowned bandit who drank cyprus in goblets of gold and the modest philosopher who slept in a tun and sipped water from his cupped hands—will seem to us more excellent and sublime the greatness of the second one who left behind at his passing only placid memories whereas he who estemed himself greater stamped his bitter life with billows of blood and blackened his conscience with the agonizing burden of his many crimes.
And while that longed-for day comes to cleanse our opprobrium when moral law finally prevails over brute force in an empire of fraternity and universal concord; while that historic peace and justice come, I repeat, to redeem us from the present barbarity...let us all work without rest as passionate pacifists and let us constantly say, at all times, with the enthusiasm of the truly convinced,
WAR BE DAMNED!!
MARIANO ALONSO
Pontevedra.
(excerpts, some placenames corrected)
To the southeast of Hohenzollern, near Hulluch, the Germans overran several British lines and made a hundred and twenty British soldiers prisoner (unharmed) and captured several machine guns.
The Germans repelled an attempt by French troops to advance in the Woods of Avocourt and Malancourt. They also repelled the enemy's nighttime push to the southwest of Dead Man's Hill.
A German reconnaissance patrol penetrated the "Pleseter" (Grenier?) Forest north of Armentières and detonated a gallery of mines in the second line of French trenches, returning unharmed with ten British prisoners.
An official communiqué from London says that the Germans made a successful raid of the British lines between the Somme and Maricourt.
The Russians defeated the Turks in the Kemalpaşa District after two days of engagement.
The Germans opened fire with rifles, machine guns and artillery and repelled several enemy attacks against Côte 304 on the banks of the river Meuse.
The Austrians launched their Valsugana offensive and captured an Italian general, sixty-two officers, two thousand five hundred soldiers, eleven machine guns and seven field guns.
The Irish insurrection continues to alarm British public opinion. The Government's intention to drown the Irish Party in blood has ignited outrage across Ireland.
A revolutionary working-class movement against compulsory military service was born in Glasgow. Three leaders of the movement were arrested and summarily shot a few hours later (?).
(Verdad y Justicia, semanario imparcial defensor de los intereses generales del distrito de Viveiro, pages 6-7. May 20, 1916)
Wherefore it informs all Spaniards resident in Spain or abroad who undertake any hostile act in contravention of the most perfect neutrality that they will forfeit their right to the protection of H. M. Government and will suffer the full weight of the measures imposed by any of the belligerent powers, without this voiding the penalties outstanding under Spanish law.
Equally subject to punishment in accordance with Article 150 of the Penal Code will be any national or foreign agents who undertake or promote on Spanish soil the recruitment of soldiers for any of the Armies or Fleets involved in the conflict.
Gaceta de Madrid. July 30, 1914.
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Gaceta de Madrid. August 7, 1914.
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Gaceta de Madrid. August 14, 1914.
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Gaceta de Madrid. August 16, 1914.
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Gaceta de Madrid. August 26, 1914.
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Madrid, November 9, 1914.—The Under Secretary, E. FERRAZ.
Gaceta de Madrid. November 10, 1914.
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