Pen and ink drawing on a German field postcard of a field hospital on the Lens-Arras road.

Sanitäts - Unterstand

Rue de Arras b.[bis] Lens



Medical aid shelter

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Sunday, August 25, 1918

"I drew up my men in the sunken road, and gave orders to advance in two waves. 'Hundred yards apart. I myself shall be between the first wave and the second.'

It was our last storm. How many times over the last few years we had advanced into the setting sun in a similar frame of mind! Les Eparges, Guillemont, St-Pierre-Vaast, Langemarck, Passchendaele, Mœuvres, Vraucourt, Mory! Another gory carnival beckoned."

Quotation Context

Excerpt from German Lieutenant Ernst Jünger's memoir Storm of Steel writing of a German attack on August 24, 1918. Jünger was wounded on the third day of Germany's 1918 Somme Offensive, Operation Michael, in March, 1918, and 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. It was Jünger's last battle of the war, as he was seriously wounded, shot through the lung, later in the day. He survives, continues to fight, and eventually, with help from his men, escapes capture, ending in a German hospital the next day. There he resumes reading Lawrence Sterne's Tristam Shandy. Jünger was awarded the Pour le Mérite on September 22.

Source

Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger, page 280, copyright © 1920, 1961, Translation © Michael Hoffman, 2003, publisher: Penguin Books, publication date: 2003

Tags

1918-08-25, 1918, August, field hospital Rue de Arras b Lens