Shaken by the hurricane of war,

the world staggered, drunk with blood.

Cruisers and dreadnoughts plied the seas and oceans, belching fire and thunder. In their wake roamed submarines and minelayers, thickly sowing the watery wastes with the seeds of death.

Aeroplanes and Zeppelins flew west and east, south and north. From the heights above the clouds a pilot's hand flung burning brands into the hives of human aggregations, the bonfires of the cities.

Crushing every living thing in their path, tanks crawled over the sands of Syria and Mesopotamia and the fields of Champagne and the Vosges, furrowed by trenches.

From the Baltic to the Black Sea and from Trabzon to Baghdad the hammers of war beat on without a pause.

The waters of the Rhine, the Marne, the Danube and the Neman were clouded with the blood of the warring peoples.

Belgium, Serbia, Romania, Galicia, Bukovina and Turkish Armenia were swathed in the flames of burning villages and towns.

The roads … Along roads wet with blood and tears came armies, artillery, baggage trains, field hospitals and refugees.

The terrible year 1916 rolled towards its close, flecked with crimson.

The sickle of war was reaping the stalks of life.

Temples and mosques, prayer-houses and churches were filled to overflowing with weeping parishioners, sorrowing, groaning and prostrated with grief.

Trains laden with bread, meat, spoiled canned food, rotting boots, field guns, shells … And the front devoured, wore out, tore up or fired all of it.

Cities writhed in the claws of cold and hunger, the groans of the villages soared to the very heavens, but the drums of war thundered on relentlessly and the guns roared in anger, drowning the squeals of dying children, and the screams of wives and mothers.

Grief came calling, and misery made its nest in the mountain auls of Chechnya, under the roofs of Ukrainian homesteads, in Cossack stanitsas and the shacks of workers’ cantons. The peasant woman wept as she plodded behind the plough. The townswoman wept as she bent her head over a notification bearing the terrible words‘Killed in action’against her beloved's name.