La Prise de Beausejour. A complicatedly manufactured French dexterity puzzle with glass top, thick card Battlefield, brass nails wound with wire, &c.
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100 years since the end of The Great War
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French soldiers in their Blue and Red Uniforms capturing a cottage in Beausejours from the Germans in their brown uniforms c1914 (R557). The style of the French uniforms was soon changed.
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As the late Eileen Scott said "It seems hard to imagine that despite all the turmoil and bloodshed of the battlefields people at home were happy to vent their venom on the enemy by knocking them about with nothing more than a few balls or a blob of mercury" All wars of the late 19th and early 20th Century were reflected in puzzles, but far the most numerous date from the first world war. In the "Bulleting Bullies" you can knock Kaiser Bill, Little Willie, Von Tirpitz, & Hindenberg into prison with a large steel ball bearing. The most popular pitfall puzzle "The Silver Bullet" and several others had you starting with 500 men and trying to roll your ball to Berlin. Every time you fell into a hole you subtracted the marked number of men from your total.
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HILL 60 (U671). Get the ball to the top of the hill. A modest English puzzle and very simple to make. A Century later and most people have forgotten what Hill 60 represented: - Only 60 feet high it looked down on the town of Ypres 3 miles away. The Germans took it from the French in 1914. Welsh miners dug tunnels under it & mined it in April 1915, Germans retaliated with continual counter attacks including gas shells. It remained in German hands until 7th June 1917 when the mines were fired. As of today the joint explosion of the series of mines on that occasion are considered to largest non-nuclear man-made explosions and were reportedly heard as far away as London and Dublin.
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A German Puzzle (Q701). Stuff the evil ones! the Englishman, the French, the Russian, the Belgian, the Serbs, the Montenegrins and the Japanese
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Click here to see a small selection of the many dexterity and other kinds of puzzle all related to World War One in The Puzzle Museum- - + - - last update 2018-11-12 1126
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