Entrenched German soldiers behind sniper plates at Slota Gora, September 26, 1916. Slota (or Zlota) Gora was in Polish Russia, west of a line running from Warsaw to Cracow. An original watercolor (over pencil) by O. Oettel, 12th company of Landwehr, IR 32 in the field. A sketch in pencil and red crayon is on the reverse.
Slota Gora26.9.16O.Oettel 12L.32.I. FeldeZlota GoraSeptember 26, 1916O. Oettel, 12th Landwehr 32nd RegimentIn the Field
"On 24 July, I went off to reconnoitre the new C section of the line of resistance, which I was to take over the following day. . . . As we were talking away, I was suddenly grabbed and pulled down. The next second, a bullet struck the sand where I had been sitting. By a lucky chance, Gipkens had noticed a rifle barrel slowly being poked through a loophole in the block only forty paces away. His sharp painter's eye had saved my life, because at that range I was a sitting duck. . . . I was told that this harmless-looking place had seen three men of the 9th Company shot in the head; it was a bad place."
Excerpt from German Lieutenant Ernst Jünger's memoir Storm of Steel. Jünger was wounded on the third day of Germany's Somme Offensive, Operation Michael, in March, 1918. He returned to his regiment on June 4. The last German offensive of the war, the Champagne-Marne Offensive, ended on July 17. The counter-offensive that would end with Allied victory, began the next day.
Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger, page 267, copyright © 1920, 1961, Translation © Michael Hoffman, 2003, publisher: Penguin Books, publication date: 2003
1918-07-24, 1918, July, sniper
