Sleepless Nights, by Kriwub. France standing by her bed, arm raised against a giant German soldier watching her through the window. A Zeppelin passes in the distance. Someone has written the years of sleepless nights in blue: 19-14-15-16-17 and perhaps -18.
Schlaflose NächteSleepless NightsReverse:Verlag Novitas, G.m.b.H. Berlin SW 68Logo: BO [DO?] in a six-pointed star; No. 245
"— A dark cloud of heavy fear lies brooding over our city. Perhaps people imagine that the German troops set free by the Russian armistice will immediately be rushed across Germany and flung into the fray?It was on the evening of the 16th that news came of the signing of that armistice, one of the most important events of the present war. But people avoid any reference to it, as they would avoid referring to a bereavement."
Entries for December 17, 1917 from the diary of Michel Corday, a senior civil servant in the French government writing in Paris. Russia had signed an armistice with the Central Powers on the 16th that sought to limit the movement of troops that Paris feared, but it excluded those deployments 'begun before the agreement was signed.' The Russian Front had been quiet for some months before the armistice was signed, and Germany could easily avoid the restriction.
The Paris Front: an Unpublished Diary: 1914-1918 by Michel Corday, page 302, copyright © 1934, by E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publisher: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publication date: 1934
1917-12-17, 1917, December, Brest-Litovsk, armistice, sleepless night
