Attractive Swiss postcard map, depicting events in Europe in late 1914, diminutive figures representing combattants & neutrals.

Der Welt-krieg

Printed colour. Used. Verso imprint stamp of “Sappeur Bat” – presumably a domestic Swiss Army Battalion. No verso adhesive stamp. Corners a little bumped, worn and rounded.

An attractive postcard map, a bird’s eye perspective of Europe, showing the unfolding hostilities of the war in the late summer of 1914, with stylised miniature soldiers deployed in the different theatres of operations and with the neutral powers in northern and southern Europe looking on. Included are the Egyptian and Persian war theatres. A be-kilted Highlander, representative of British BEF, steps across the Channel into Northern France. Perhaps most interestingly a turbaned Indian soldier is shown disembarking from a boat in the south of France and being immediately directed to the Western front by a French poilu, a reference to the first arrival of indigenous British colonial troops from the Subcontinent in Marseilles at the end of September 1914, only six weeks after the first declaration of war. Some Indian units would be on the front line on the Western front only two weeks later. Confrontations and hostilities are also pinpointed in Persia and Egypt, where German-Ottoman forces would attack the Suez Canal from Southern Palestine, across the Sinai Peninsula, in Feb 1915. The armed figure of Japan is also included in Eastern Russia. An uncommon early wartime postcard published in neutral Switzerland, in Basel, by the firm of K Essig.