1917 photograph of Austro-Hungarian soldiers posing on the ruins of a destroyed plane, likely a pusher with the engine facing the rear of the plane.
"In Germany and Austria the early days of July were a time of scarcity, of explosions of pacifist sentiment in the Reichstag, and of open defiance of edicts of the Imperial Government. The Brest-Litovsk peace and resulting measures taken to include the old dominions of the Czar in the Mittel-Europa trading complex only resulted in spreading the Bolshevik contagion through the kingdoms, dukedoms and city states of the central empires. The imperial confederation that Bismarck cemented was shaking apart. Even Prussia, the cornerstone was cracking.The Kaiser had assured his subjects that Ludendorff's spring offensives would bring peace with victory, but all the German workingpeople could see was an immense new butcher's bill, and hunger and stringency. It was the turn of the Germans to get tired of being killed. They were beginning to listen to Bolshevik agitators whispering that peace lay in defeat."
German Commander Erich Ludendorff mounted four offensives on the Western Front between March 21 and June 14, 1918. They bent but did not break that Allies, and did not end the war with a German victory. There would be one more beginning in mid-July. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed between Russia and the Central Powers in March, 1918 following Russia's Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917.
Mr. Wilson's War by John Dos Passos, page 347, copyright © 1962, 2013 by John Dos Passos, publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
1918-07-08, 1918, July, Bolshevik, Bismarck, Kaiser, Ludendorff, peace, Austro-Hungarians destroyed plane
