Mom's birthday

Section 580 moves on the 13th from Suippes to Dampierre-sur-Moivre.



The History Channel tells us that on the 13th,

five days after an Allied attack at Amiens, France, leads German commander Erich Ludendorff to declare “the black day of the German army,” Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany summons his principal political and military leaders to a crown council at Spa, a resort town in Belgium, to assess the status of the German war effort during World War I.

On August 11, after the Allied victory at Amiens kicked off a new Allied offensive on the Western Front, Ludendorff and Paul von Hindenburg, chief of the German army’s general staff, told the new naval chief, Admiral Reinhardt Scheer, that Germany’s only hope to win the war was through submarine warfare. “There is no more hope for the offensive,” the downtrodden Ludendorff told a staff member on August 12. “The generals have lost their foothold.”

At the crown council assembled on August 13-14 by the kaiser at Spa, where the German High Command had its headquarters, Ludendorff recommended that Germany initiate immediate peace negotiations. Ludendorff failed, however, to present the true extent of the military’s disadvantage on the battlefield; instead, he blamed revolt and anti-war sentiment on the home front for the military’s inability to continue the war effort indefinitely. Meanwhile, the chief military adviser to Austrian Emperor Karl I informed Wilhelm that Austria-Hungary could only continue its participation in the war until that December. Though the kaiser thought it advisable to seek an intermediary to begin peace negotiations, his newly appointed foreign minister, Paul von Hintze, refused to take such an approach until another German victory on the battlefield had been achieved. Hintze, working on suppressing discontent and rebellion within the German government, told party leaders the following week that “there was no reason to doubt ultimate victory. We shall be vanquished only when we doubt that we shall win.”

Meanwhile, on the battlefront in Flanders, Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, one of the German army’s most senior commanders, wrote of his own doubt to Prince Max of Baden (the kaiser’s second cousin, who would become chancellor of Germany the following October): “Our military situation has deteriorated so rapidly that I no longer believe we can hold out over the winter; it is even possible that a catastrophe will come earlier….The Americans are multiplying in a way we never dreamed of….At the present time there are already thirty-one American divisions in France.” The Allied commanders, for their part, pushed their troops forward on the Western Front and made aggressive preparations for future offensives in 1919, unaware that victory would come before the year was out.

Here is the front page from the New York Times as Herb is writing home:


I tried to swipe a picture of the church Herb mentions from a french web site. I'm afraid it is awfully small.

Mother, is, of course, Nellie Jane Kirkpatrick Lee.

August 11th (1918)

Dearest Mother,
This wasn’t a very good week – I didn’t get any mail at all. Outside of that everything is all right. The Sector has been fairly quiet though there have been several small attacks – nothing on a large scale.

This week we’ve had news of two more Allied victories on a large scale. I believe the Crown Prince has given up his idea of eating dinner in Paris. If he doesn’t do better he won’t even be able to eat his Christmas dinner in Berlin except as a prisoner-of-war.

The weather is fair – some rain but not enough to hurt. I’ve been as well as can be – don’t think I ever felt better.

You know it’s very funny that I don’t hear from either Charlie or Mr. Friedman. I’ve been writing them both – not very often, I’ll admit, but fairly regularly and yet I’ve only heard from both of them but once.

I’ve had several strokes of luck that enable me to get hold of a supply of tobacco and cigarettes that ought to last a little while.

August 13

Since I started this letter we have moved back to rest billets in a typical small French village. It has an old, old stone church with a belfry a scattering of stone houses and bars and manure piles and a great deal of decoration in the shape of clothes spread or hung out to dry everywhere. Our barracks are in an old barn but they’re dry and quite clean, so there’s no complaint. At any rate it’s quiet and that’s a whole lot. At night one can catch a faint rumbling from the front lines if the artillery fire is very heavy an of course there’s enough possibility of an air raid to make it necessary to darken all lights at night.

I had a letter from Mr. Friedman yesterday – just a note rather, wondering why he did not hear from me. This was written about the middle of July and he said he had only heard from me once. That’s pretty discouraging, you know. He is expecting an addition to the family and is, of course, quite delighted. They have no children, you know. Mrs. Friedman is delicate, suffers from some sort of chronic anemia and lack of sufficient red corpuscles.

I also had a letter from Karolyn in that mail but none from you, worse luck.

Two days more of news from different parts of the front seems to lead to the cheering conclusion that the German defenses are if anything a bit more easily broken now than were our own in the early Spring. Some of these days they’ll come to with a rush.

By the time you get this your birthday will have come and gone, Mother dear, but I want you to know that I’ll be thinking of you. For the next one I’ll be with you.

With best love,
Your affectionate son,
Herb