an soldiers went missing on the hill, their bodies never found.
The Battles of the Isonzo River, Italy
From June 1915 to November 1917, Italian forces fought the armies of Austria-Hungary in a series of 12 battles along the Isonzo River. Also known as the Isonzo Front, the engagements were disappointing for both sides and without any tangible tactical merit. But the casualties were enormous; about 300,000 for Italy and 200,000 for Austria-Hungary.
Belleau Wood, France
This is the scene of the first major battle fought by American soldiers in the Great War. The Battle of Belleau Wood (June 1st-26th, 1918) was, in the words of General Pershing, "for the U.S. the biggest battle since Appomattox and the most considerable engagement American troops had ever had with a foreign enemy." Some 1,811 American soldiers were killed, but the marines were largely successful in expelling German forces from the forests.
In 1915, Allied troops staged an amphibious landing in an effort to secure the Gallipoli peninsula and open a new front in Turkey. But after eight months of fighting, the land campaign had to be called off — an ill-planned and poorly thought-out engagement that forced Prime Minister Asquith to end his Liberal government and form a coalition with the Conservative party. It also cost Winston Churchill his job as First Lord of the Admiralty. In the picture above, the remains of an ancient castle, Sedd el Bahr Kale, can be seen from V Beach.
The Masurian Lakes, East Prussia (Poland)
Early in the war, in order to support France in the west, Russia launched an attack on Germany. Though outnumbered 2-to-1, the Germans responded by flushing out the Russian armies in the First Battle of the Masurian Lakes. It was a crushing defeat for Russia — one that contributed significantly to the prolongation of the war and the stalemate in the West.
In regards to the soccer ball picture, the following description was written by Patrick Macgill who achieved fame after the war as a poet and writer and who was a stretcher bearer during the battle:
I peered over the top. The air blazed with star-shells, and Loos in front stood out like a splendid dawn. A row of impassive faces, sleep-heavy they looked, lined our parapet; bayonets, silver-spired, stood up over the sandbags; the dark bays, the recessed dug-outs with their khaki-clad occupants dimly defined in the light of little candles took on fantastic shapes. From the North Sea to the Alps stretched a line of men who could, if they so desired, clasp, one another's hands all the way along. A joke which makes men laugh at Ypres at dawn may be told on sentry-go at Souchez by dusk, and the laugh which accompanies it ripples through the long, deep trenches... until it breaks itself like a summer wave against the traverse where England ends and France begins.
Many of our men were asleep, and maybe dreaming. What were their dreams? . . . I could hear faint, indescribable rustlings as the winds loitered across the levels in front; a light shrapnel shell burst, and its smoke quivered in the radiant light of the star-shells. Showers and sparks fell from high up and died away as they fell. Like lives of men, I thought, and again that feeling of proximity to the enemy surged through me.
A boy came along the trench carrying a football under his arm. "What are you going to do with that?" I asked.
"It's some idea, this," he said with a laugh.
"We're going to kick it across into the German trench."
"It is some idea," I said. "What are our chances of victory in the game?"
"The playing will tell," he answered.
It was now grey day, hazy and moist, and the thick clouds of pale yellow smoke curled high in space and curtained the dawn off from the scene of war. The word was passed along. "London Irish lead on to assembly trench." The assembly trench was in front, and there the scaling ladders were placed against the parapet, ready steps to death, as someone remarked. I had a view of the men swarming up the ladders when I got there, their bayonets held in steady hands, and at a little distance off a football swinging