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
"— On the 10th it was announced that, in future, we should not be allowed to eat anything but stale bread, to be sold twelve hours after baking. It is thought this will reduce its consumption. . . .— A profound despair, a loathing of life, seized me when I read in the papers the statements of the British C.-in-C. Haig . . .— Someone mentions to me a German medical journal which states that children there are being born without finger-nails (owing to their mothers' lack of phosphates) . . ."
Entries from the days immediately after February 10, 1917 from the diary of Michel Corday, French senior civil servant. On January 24, Corday recorded that a coal crisis had broken out, that women were queuing outside stores, and that shops had no fuel for central heating; on February 2 that people were felling trees as a coal-substitute. At the end of February he would record, 'the stale bread epoch began on the 25th. Mild grumbles. People say they have to eat more of it than they used to eat of new.'
The Paris Front: an Unpublished Diary: 1914-1918 by Michel Corday, page 230, copyright © 1934, by E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publisher: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publication date: 1934
1917-02-10, 1917, February, child, children, bread, food, food shortage, sleepless night
