Looking like a model or a piece by Yves Tanguy, a photograph of part of the destroyed city of Lens, France dated September 18, 1918.
LenzLensReverse:18 September 1918
"With each day, the bombardment became more intensive, and it soon seemed all but certain that an attack must follow. On the 27th [April], at midnight, I had the following telegraph message: '67 beginning 5 a.m.', which in our code meant that from five o'clock tomorrow we were to be on a heightened state of alert.I promptly lay down right away, so as to be up to the anticipated exertions, but as I was on the point of sleep, a shell struck the house, smashed the wall against the basement steps, and filled our room with rubble. We leaped up and hurried into the shelter."
German Lieutenant Ernst Jünger was in Fresnoy-en-Gohelle, France, in April, 1917, during the Battle of Arras. In his memoir he comments on the dogfights overhead, imagining they include Manfred von Richthofen who was then enjoying deadly success in the Arras sector. Much of the chapter on his time in Fresnoy is about the terrific bombardments he survives, one of them by a naval gun, some he finds 'pedantic preliminary bombardments' by the British that leave 'ample time to vacate the target area,' and another which reaches 'an extraordinary pitch.' He leaves Fresnoy 'a maelstrom of devastation.'
Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger, page 135, copyright © 1920, 1961, Translation © Michael Hoffman, 2003, publisher: Penguin Books, publication date: 2003
1917-04-27, 1917, April, destroyed Lens
