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
"— the 23rd. Still waiting for the great offensive. 'They give us the programme and the date as if it were a special performance at the Opéra,' writes Anatole France from Antibes. We are also expecting an air raid on Paris. The newspapers themselves are reviving this fear by the renewed warnings. . . .— the 23rd. An announcement has been made of the restriction of the bread ration to ten ounces. All preceding orders have been cancelled. There is fear of an outbreak of discontent among the working classes. Workmen and farm-hands consume two pounds of bread a day. Cakes have also been abolished, but the tea-rooms substitute cream buns and croquettes, which use up other equally scarce materials, such as butter, milk, and sugar."
Entries for January 23, 1918, from the diary of Michel Corday, a senior civil servant in the French government writing in Paris. Corday wrote frequently about the luxury available in the French capital that was denied the less fortunate and the soldiers at the front. Since the Bolshevik Revolution in November, 1917, and the armistice and subsequent peace negotiations between Russia and the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk, the Allies had been anticipating a German offensive in the west bolstered by forces moved from the Eastern Front. Anatole France was a French poet, novelist, and journalist, and a friend of Corday who appears numerous times in Corday's diary. Antibes is on the French Mediterranean coast.
The Paris Front: an Unpublished Diary: 1914-1918 by Michel Corday, pp. 309–310, copyright © 1934, by E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publisher: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publication date: 1934
1918-01-23, 1918, January, Paris, air raid, spring offensive, sleepless night
