Mounted Russian representatives to a peace parley on the Eastern Front.
Russische Friedens Parlementaire an der Ostfront.Russian Peace Parley Representatives on the Eastern Front.
"German aircraft had made reconnaissance persistently over the Russian lines throughout the 17th, and at dawn on the 18th [February 1918] the field-grey hosts went forward, capturing Dvinsk in the north and Luck in the south. The advance could not in the military sense of the term be called an offensive, for the Russian troops made no resistance whatsoever. They were more demoralized than the Germans had even expected. The bulk of the troops had already gone home. The remainder, already in a state of disintegration, fled or surrendered wholesale; on one occasion a lieutenant and six men received the surrender of six hundred Cossacks. The old Russian army, long ago wounded to the death, was falling to pieces, blocking the railways, roads, and byways; the new Red Army was as yet rising but slowly from the appalling chaos of dissolution."
Leon Trotsky, head of the Russian delegation to the Brest-Litovsk peace conference with the Central Powers, left the negotiations on February 10, 1918 saying Russia would not sign a peace treaty, but would withdraw from the war. In the following days Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin debated whether the Germans would accept this situation or resume hostilities. On the 16th General Hoffmann, military head of the German delegation, delivered his response: the armistice was ended. Two days later the Germans resumed the war, advancing against little to no resistance.
Brest-Litovsk: The Forgotten Peace; March 1918 by John W. Wheeler-Bennett by John W. Wheeler-Bennett, page 244, publisher: The Norton Library, publication date: 1971, first published 193
1918-02-18, 1918, February, Russia
