DECEMBER 31, 1914-JANUARY 1, 1915: NEW YEAR IN A WORLD AT WAR
“What does this New Year which rises before us, veiled like Isis and as enigmatic as the Sphinx, hold concealed in its cloak? Of what are our great military chiefs and politicians thinking? What decisions will they come to about us?” This entry from a Frenchwoman’s diary captured the sense of anxiety and helplessness felt by ordinary Europeans as the year 1914 drew to a close, bringing down the curtain on a world in upheaval. Elsewhere the young British poet Roland Leighton described the scene in London’s Piccadilly Circus in a letter to his girlfriend Vera Brittain:
"There was very little demonstration; two Frenchmen standing up in a cab singing the ‘Marseillaise’; a few women and some soldiers behind me holding hands and softly humming ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ When twelve o’clock struck there was only a little shudder among the crowd and a distant muffled cheer and then everyone seemed to melt away again, leaving me standing there with tears in my eyes and feeling absolutely wretched."
Indeed, as 1914 drew to a close there was nothing to celebrate. In just five months the worst manmade catastrophe ever to befall Europe had undone centuries of progress, stripping away illusory notions of reason, honor, and glory as it tore up treaties, targeted civilians,desecrated cultural heritage, and tested new methods of anonymous mass destruction. When the war began many believed it would be over by Christmas, but now that seemed like a bad joke. A German soldier, Herbert Sulzbach, wrote in his diary: “This terrible war goes on and on, and whereas you thought at the start that it would be over in a few weeks, there is now no end in sight. Your feelings harden, you become increasingly indifferent, you don’t think about the next day any more…”
Sulzbach and Leighton were just two among millions of young men wrenched from their ordinary day-to-day lives and plunged into the cauldron of war. On the Allied side, by December 1914 France had mobilized 4.8 million men, Russia 6.6 million men, and Britain 1.4 million men, for a total of around 13.8 million troops under arms (when Serbian, Belgian, and Montenegrin forces are included). Opposing them in the Central Powers, Germany had mobilized 4.4 million men, Austria-Hungary 3.4 million men, and the Ottoman Empire 500,000 men, for a total of around 8.3 million troops under arms.
Credit: Rarepostcard.com
The casualties inflicted in the opening war of maneuver and the first months of trench warfare, culminating on the Western Front in the inferno of Ypres, were nothing short of mindboggling. On the Allied side, Britain’s total losses of around 100,000 men, including 16,374 dead, were only the tip of the iceberg. While estimates vary, by the end of December 1914 France may have suffered almost a million casualties, including 306,000 killed, 220,000 taken prisoner, and 490,000 wounded, and Russian losses were even worse. AtTannenberg alone the Russians lost 30,000 killed and missing, 50,000 wounded, and 90,000 taken prisoner; by the end of December 1914 total Russian casualties came to around 1.8 million – half its prewar strength – including 396,000 dead, 485,000 taken prisoner, and countless wounded (below, wounded in a Moscow military hospital).
Credit: Englishrussia
The Central Powers suffered comparable losses. German casualties also came to about a million, including 241,000 dead, 155,000 taken prisoner, and 540,000 wounded, while Austria-Hungary – its pre-war army all but destroyed by multiple debacles on the Eastern Front and in the Balkans – suffered over 1.3 million casualties, including around 145,000 killed, 485,000 wounded, 412,000 missing or taken prisoner, and 283,000 sick or injured (the last figure reflecting the looming menace of typhus, one of the war’s worst nonhuman killers).
http://mentalfloss.com/article/60893/wwi-centennial-new-year-world-war
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