1918 German pen and ink drawing of the road to Cambrai, France. Two smaller trees seem to serve as the good and bad thief on either side of the crucified Jesus Christ.
Strasse nach CambraiEKIECBJR?
"At eleven o'clock on 23 August, I had just dropped off to sleep when I was woken by loud knocking on the door. An orderly had come with marching orders. All day, the rolling and stamping of unusually heavy artillery fire had blown across the front, and had reminded us on the exercise grounds, over our lunch and over games of cards, not to be too hopeful as far as the further duration of this rest period was concerned. We had coined an onomatopoeic front-line expression for this distant sound of cannons: 'It's whumping.'We hurriedly got packed up and were on the road to Cambrai during a cloudburst."
Excerpt from German Lieutenant Ernst Jünger's memoir Storm of Steel. Jünger was wounded on the third day of Germany's 1918 Somme Offensive, Operation Michael, in March, 1918. He returned to his regiment on June 4. The last German offensive of the war, the Champagne-Marne Offensive, ended on July 17. The counter-offensive that would end with Allied victory began the next day. In the summer of 1918, 250,000 American soldiers were arriving on the Western Front each month. French and British production of weapons — including tanks and aircraft — supplied the Allied armies, and far outpaced German production. Allied Commander-in-Chief Ferdinand Foch kept up constant attacks on the German line from mid-July on. The 1917 Battle of Cambrai was the first significant tank battle, a British victory, the gains of which were lost to German counter-attacks in subsequent days.
Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger, page 276, copyright © 1920, 1961, Translation © Michael Hoffman, 2003, publisher: Penguin Books, publication date: 2003
1918-08-23, August, 1918, Cambrai
