‘I am healthy and doing well.’

Accordingly, the military authorities went to great lengths to ensure that postal traffic functioned as smoothly as possible. In view of the huge volumes of mail and – especially at the beginning of the war – the frequent troop movements, this was only partially successful. Delays, wrong delivery and losses were common, in part due to items being incorrectly addressed. The problems that the military postal service encountered very soon provoked the first complaints from soldiers and their relatives. This predicament was made worse by the repeated interruption of postal traffic by so-called Postsperren (postal embargo/suspension of postal services). These were decreed for a variety of reasons, including the concealment of troop redeployments and offensives, but also because of the often rapid rise in the numbers of letters and parcels within a short space of time. The volume of items sent, especially at Christmas, quite simply exceeded the capacity of the Imperial and Royal Feldpost to convey them.

In order to alleviate anxiety and complaints among soldiers at the front and those at home, from 28 August 1916 special field service postcards on pre-printed green paper were issued in Austria-Hungary bearing the message Ich bin gesund und es geht mir gut (‘I am healthy and doing well’) in the nine languages of the multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire: German, Hungarian, Czech, Polish, Ruthenian, Italian, Slovenian, Serbo-Croat and Romanian. Sent in their millions, these postcards were not allowed to bear any additional information but could be used as a substitute for banned private communications during a postal embargo.

However, the issuing of these pre-printed postcards failed to stem the complaints expressed in many letters about the non-appearance of mail or lengthy delivery times. Typical examples of this can be found in the wartime correspondence of the middle-class couple Mathilde and Ottokar Hanzel, where the former writes in December 1917: ‘Owing to the appalling conditions currently prevailing in the postal system no green postcard has arrived.’ Or a month later, in January 1918: ‘I am very sorry that the post is so wretchedly slow […].’

Translation: Sophie Kidd