Women workers in a German munitions factory. The man on the right is holding a cigarette.
"Don't things look luverly in the East? Well, it removes all doubt. We have to fight until Germany will behave well on this front at least. On the other, nothing save an over-powering defeat can make any difference — and that is hardly likely, is it?Our hopes lie in the fact, that German soldiers, though they may be willing to go on to the end, know perfectly well that the cost has been too great, and that the working classes can not allow themselves so to be cheated, bullied, misused, ever again."
Ivor Gurney, English poet, composer, and private in the Gloucestershire Regiment, writing to the composer Marion Margaret Scott, on February 25, 1918 from hospital in Newcastle. He had been sent back to the United Kingdom after being gassed in September, 1917. After a failure to reach a peace settlement with Russia in negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, Germany had ended the armistice between Russia and the Central Powers that had held since December 16, 1917, and resumed the war against Russia.
War Letters, Ivor Gurney, a selection edited by R.K.R. Thornton by Ivor Gurney, page 246, copyright © J. R. Haines, the Trustee of the Ivor Gurney Estate 1983, publisher: The Hogarth Press, publication date: 1984
1918-02-25, 1918, February, German advance into Russia, German worker, German woman munitions worker
