Zweibund — the Dual Alliance — Germany and Austria-Hungary united, were the core of the Central Powers, and here join hands. The bars of Germany's flag border the top left, and those of the Habsburg Austrian Empire and ruling house the bottom right.
Schulter an SchulterUntrennbar vereintin Freud und in Leid!'Shoulder to shoulderInseparably united in joy and in sorrow!
"On September 23, at four in the afternoon, the regiment was assembled and massed in a square in a meadow. Our Colonel Poujal announced what we already knew, that a general offensive was going to be unleashed, that at this moment the Russians were falling back, but while most of the Germans were bogged down in Poland we would crush them on our front.'And now,' he cried in a loud voice. "Forward! No more hernias! No more weak hearts! No more ached and pains! Nothing but the will to win! Vive la France!"This patriotic nonsense didn't arouse the slightest enthusiasm. We hadn't forgotten the horrors of the last offensive in Lorette. An impressive silence greeted the colonel's final words. Only the undertaker Torrès smiled. He nodded his head as if to say, "Yes, let the herniated, the weak-hearted, the sciatics come to me. They'll get a nice reception!""
Extract from the notebooks of French Corporal Louis Barthas whose reserve unit was in the process of being moved from Flanders to the Arras sector in Artois to take part in the Third Battle of Artois, part of the great autumn Anglo-French offensive of 1915. Barthas and many of his reservists were older, and suffered the ailments (or complained of them) listed by Colonel Poujal. The preliminary bombardment had begun and, on September 24, Barthas 'could hear a violent cannonade all along the front.' The corporals were assembled in the company post and given one cutlass for each of their men (14 to Barthas). Having heard elsewhere the weapons were for slaying the wounded and killing prisoners, Barthas and all but one of his men discarded them.
Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914-1918 by Louis Barthas, page 107, copyright © 2014 by Yale University, publisher: Yale University Press, publication date: 2014
1915-09-23, 1915, September, Third Artois, Third Battle of Artois, Artois
