This Day in World War 1 History: JUNE 02, 1915 : AUSTRO-GERMAN FORCES ATTACK RUSSIANS AT PRZEMYSL

On June 2, 1915, Austro-Hungarian and German troops continue their attacks on the Russian soldiers holding Przemysl (now in Poland), the citadel guarding the northeastern-most point of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Used as the Austrian army headquarters during the first months of World War I, Przemysl was ordered to hold out until the end in the face of the surprisingly effective Russian advance into Austria-Hungary in the fall of 1914. After six months under siege, facing severe food shortages and heavy casualties, the last Austro-Hungarian troops at Przemysl finally relinquished control of the citadel on March 22, 1915.

With their hard-fought victory, Russia’s troops had gained a certain measure of control in the much-contested Galician region of Austria and were poised to move into Hungary. This was not to be, however, as the powerful German army stepped in to offer more help to their faltering ally. Over the course of the next several months, Austro-German forces began moving swiftly and aggressively on the Eastern Front, recapturing the passes of the Carpathian Mountains and moving steadily forward into Galicia. On May 25, the Germans announced they had taken some 21,000 Russian prisoners east of the San River; the Russians were soon pushed back toward Przemysl, and battle began there once again.

On June 2, 1915, Austro-German forces were nearing victory against the exhausted Russians at Przemysl; the citadel fell back into the hands of the Central Powers the following day. The recapture of Przemysl effectively marked the end of Russian control in Galicia. As a British observer wrote dismissively of the Russian troops, This army is now a harmless mob.

Article Details:

June 02, 1915 : Austro-German forces attack Russians at Przemysl

• Author

  History.com Staff

• Website Name

  History.com

• Year Published

  2009

• Title

  June 02, 1915 : Austro-German forces attack Russians at Przemysl

• URL

  http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/austro-german-forces-attack-russians-at-przemysl

• Access Date

  June 02, 2015

• Publisher

  A+E Networks

This Day in World War 1 History: JUNE 01, 1916 : GERMANS LAUNCH ATTACK ON BRITISH LINES IN YPRES SALIENT

On the first day of June 1916, as German and British naval forces clash in the North Sea during the Battle of Jutland and the French resist the persistent German siege at Verdun, German army troops launch a major attack on British lines in the Ypres Salient on the Western Front.

As the nexus of an Allied salient that blocked any German advance to the English Channel, the town of Ypres, Belgium, saw nearly constant fighting during World War I. Three major battles—in October-November 1914, April-May 1915 and July-November 1917—punctuated a stream of smaller attacks, including one on June 1, 1916, by German troops. The Germans advanced 700 yards through the British trenches along a 3,000-yard front near Ypres; among the casualties were one British general killed and one taken prisoner. Within 48 hours, however, the British were able recover some of the captured ground.

On the same day, at the city of Verdun, France, where French troops had been under siege since February 21, 1916, the Germans began a fresh attack against Fort Vaux, one of two principal fortresses used to defend Verdun. The other, Fort Douaumont, had fallen on February 25, but Fort Vaux had managed to hold out for three months under a relentless German onslaught. A previous assault, on March 2, had been thrown back by French forces, though one of the prisoners taken that day was Captain Charles de Gaulle, wounded in the thigh by a German bayonet. The German attack that began June 1 proved too much for the French defenders, and on June 7 the Germans finally captured Fort Vaux and its 600 surviving soldiers.

Verdun itself, however, continued to hold out, as the French desperately urged their allies, Britain and Russia, to launch offensives of their own to divert German men and resources. Russia responded first, with the famed Brusilov Offensive—named for General Alexei Brusilov—that nearly decimated the Austro-Hungarian army on the Eastern Front. In early July, Britain struck the Germans near the Somme River in France, as grinding, bloody battles continued on all fronts of World War I.

Article Details:

June 01, 1916 : Germans launch attack on British lines in Ypres Salient

• Author

  History.com Staff

• Website Name

  History.com

• Year Published

  2009

• Title

  June 01, 1916 : Germans launch attack on British lines in Ypres Salient

• URL

  http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/germans-launch-attack-on-british-lines-in-ypres-salient

• Access Date

  June 01, 2015

• Publisher

  A+E Networks

This Day in World War 1 History: MAY 29, 1913 : CONTROVERSIAL BALLET LE SACRE DU PRINTEMPS PERFORMED IN PARIS

On the night of Thursday, May 29, 1913, the pioneering Russian ballet corps Ballet Russes performs Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring), choreographed by the famous dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, at the Theatre de Champs-Elysees in Paris.

In founding the Ballet Russes in 1909, the flamboyant impresario Serge Diaghilev was searching for his own version of the Gesamtkunstwerk (or total art form), a concept introduced by the enormously influential German composer Richard Wagner in his book Oper und Drama (1850-51). Early in the second decade of a new century, Diaghilev saw ballet, and indeed all art, as a means of deliverance from the confines of morality and convention that had ruled Western society in the 19th century. This kind of avant-gardesensibility was widespread in Europe by 1913—particularly in Germany, the birthplace of the era’s most prominent philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, whose writings articulated both the sense of chaos and destruction and the call for a violent rebirth of modern society that Stravinsky, Diaghilev and Nijinsky strove to portray in Le Sacre.

When the curtain went up in the newly constructed—and architecturally controversial—Theatre de Champs-Elysees on May 29, 1913, it seemed all of Paris society was there. There was great anticipation surrounding Diaghilev’s newest production; advance publicity for the ballet had called it real and true art, art that disregarded the traditional boundaries of space and time. Almost as soon as the curtain rose, the audience began to react strongly to the performance, starting with whistles and proceeding to hisses and howls as the dancers appeared. Originally titled The Victim, Stravinsky’s ballet portrayed a pagan celebration in which a virgin sacrifices herself to the god of spring. The music was dissonant and strange, while the choreography by Nijinsky marked a radical departure from classical ballet, with the dancers’ toes turned in and their limbs thrust at sharp angles instead of smooth, rounded curves.

As Carl Van Vechten, drama critic for the New York Sun later wrote, the unruly audience became as much a part of the performance as the dancers and musicians: Some forty of the protestants were forced out of the theater but that did not quell the disturbance. The lights in the auditorium were fully turned on but the noise continued and I remember Mlle. Piltz [the dancer portraying the sacrificial maiden] executing her strange dance of religious hysteria on a stage dimmed by the blazing light in the auditorium, seemingly to the accompaniment of the disjointed ravings of a mob of angry men and women. The subsequent coverage in the press of the ballet—which is now considered one of the great musical achievements of the 20th century—was resoundingly negative; the music was dismissed as mere noise and the dance as an ugly parody of traditional ballet.

In light of the horrifically destructive conflict that exploded in Europe barely one year later, the violent reaction to Le Sacre de Printempscame to seem like a logical and inescapable response to such an expression of nihilism and chaos. Against a background of growing nationalist fervor across the continent, French audiences were understandably anxious—about their own country’s declining influence in the face of Germany’s growing strength, about the seeming failure of traditional notions of morality and order and about what was to come. A year later, during the July Crisis, the French critic Maurice Dupont praised the sanity of the French reaction, calling Le Sacre a Dionysian orgy dreamed of by Nietzsche and called forth by his prophetic wish to be the beacon of a world hurtling towards death—a wish that would soon be fulfilled on the battlefields of World War I.

Article Details:

May 29, 1913 : Controversial ballet Le Sacre du printemps performed in Paris

• Author

  History.com Staff

• Website Name

  History.com

• Year Published

  2009

• Title

  May 29, 1913 : Controversial ballet Le Sacre du printemps performed in Paris

• URL

  http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/controversial-ballet-le-sacre-du-printemps-performed-in-paris

• Access Date

  May 29, 2015

• Publisher

  A+E Networks