A photo postcard of a German trench view of barbed wire and a dead patrol. Dated February 22, 1916, and field postmarked the next day, the message is from a soldier to his uncle, and reads in part, 'yesterday we heard that 4 fortresses of Verdun were taken. This have been a lot of shooting . . . Maybe this is the end of Verdun and peace will come soon . . . the barbed wire on the other side of the card is French. You can see dead patrols . . .' (Translation from the German courtesy Thomas Faust.) Evidently the author safely reached the French trench line.
Reverse:France Feb 22 1916 - Dear Uncle, yesterday we have heard that 4 fortresses of Verdun were taken. This have been a lot of shooting ... Maybe this is the end of Verdun and peace will come soon ... the barbed wire on the other side of the card is French. You can see dead patrols ... (Translation from the German courtesy Thomas Faust (Ebay's Urfaust).)
"We crawled towards a gap in the enemy wires, which Kloppman had cut the night before. We were unpleasantly surprised, then, to find it had been patched up; therefore we cut it again, rather noisily, and climbed down into the trench. After looking around for a long time behind the nearest traverse, we crept on, following a telephone wire to its end in a bayonet stuck in the ground. We found the position blocked off several times by wire, and once by a heavy gate, but all of it unoccupied. After taking a good look at it all, we went back the same way, and patched the wire to conceal the fact that we'd been."
German Lieutenant Ernst Jünger had fought in the first days of the Third Battle of Ypres, begun on July 31, 1917, but on August 10 was redeployed to the front southeast of Verdun, on the hills above Regniéville, a Village Détruit, a village destroyed in the war and never rebuilt. Kloppmann was 'an NCO, an older, married man who distinguished himself by his great zest for battle.' The two men planned the raid described above, and carried if off on August 29. Kloppman went again the following night and was met by rifle fire and hand grenades. Both Jünger and Kloppman went again on August 31, returning safely after being fired upon.
Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger, page 183, copyright © 1920, 1961, Translation © Michael Hoffman, 2003, publisher: Penguin Books, publication date: 2003
1917-08-29, 1917, August, trench raid, raid, Verdun barbed wire
