The War Rages On 899

specified by the Munitions of War Act of May 1915. The act forbade strikes
and provided for the requisition of skilled workers for labor in factories,
which were converted to the production of war materiel. Supplying the front
with shells alone was a monumental task. In the opening months of the
war, 500 German trains crossed the Rhine every day to supply troops. The
nineteen-day artillery barrage at the third Battle of Ypres in 1917 expended
all shells carried to the front by 321 trains, the output of a years work for
55,000 armament workers.
The war spurred other changes in daily life at home. As heavy drinking
became more widespread, legislation restricted the operating hours of
British pubs. Some complained that the war had brought Britain a loosening
of morals, frivolous dress and dancing, and an increase in juvenile delin­
quency. Daylight savings time was introduced for the first time to conserve
fuel. A successful campaign for voluntary rationing of essential commodities
such as sugar allowed the British to avoid mandatory rationing until early
1917, when hoarding contributed to shortages. The government instituted a
coupon system, but price controls on essential commodities served to ration

food.

Suffragette leaders, who had put aside their campaign for women’s right

to vote, threw their support behind the war. Millicent Garrett Fawcett

(1847-1929), a leading British feminist, appealed to the readers of a suf­

frage magazine: “Women, your country needs you.... Let us show ourselves

worthy of Citizenship,” proclaiming that she considered pacifism almost the

equivalent of treason.

The War Rages On

Early in 1915, the French general staff predicted that its army would break

through the German lines. However French attacks in the spring in Cham­

pagne and then in Artois further north brought enormous casualties but

little progress (see Map 22.4). A British assault at Neuve Chapelle on March

10 gained 1,000 yards at a cost of 13,000 casualties. The British lost almost

300,000     men in 1915 alone; the Germans, who had a much larger army,

suffered at least 610,000 casualties. Both nations’ casualties, however daunt­

ing, paled alongside those of the French, who suffered 1,292,000 killed and

wounded in 1915. French infantrymen were not helped by the fact that

their uniform pants were, at least in the early stages of the war, bright red,

which could be more easily seen through the morning mists than the Ger­

man gray.

Italy had remained neutral at the outbreak of the war but gave in to street

demonstrations and entered the war on the Allied side through the secret

Treaty of London, signed in April 1915. Britain and France held out as bait

territories many Italian nationalists claimed as part of “Italian Irredenta”

(“unredeemed lands”), including the Tyrol in the Alps and Istria along the