German soldiers posing for photographs with their weapons and gear in a trench, July - August, 1915.
German soldiers posing for photographs with their weapons and gear in a trench, July - August, 1915.
These photographs, belonging to @drakegoodmanofficial, were all taken by a German private Fritz Limbach from the German 16th Infantry Regiment near La Bassée on the Western Front. The following information was provided on Drake Goodman's Flickr:
In the first, second, third, and fourth photographs we see young German soldiers sitting on a fire-step armed with an M1915 Stielhandgranate hand-grenade, a Gewehr 98 infantry rifle and an improvised trench periscope to observe no man's land and the enemy's trench, in this case the British.
I'm guessing the soldiers took turns to have photographs taken of them with the weaponry. These four photographs were taken on July 27, 1915, and the soldier on the fourth photograph has been identified as an Otto Mertens.
In the fifth and sixth photographs we see two German soldiers standing in the middle of the trench, the first one posing with a Gewehr 98 and the second with a dagger. They're both equipped with M1915 Stielhandgranaten as well. These two photographs were taken on August 25, 1915.
In the seventh photograph we see six young German soldiers posing for a photograph outside a tunnel, some of them smoking cigarettes. Five of them are wearing scarfs which one of the soldiers received in a package from home. This photograph was taken around August 12, 1915.
Shortly after these photographs were taken, the 16th Infantry Regiment fought in the Battle of Loos in September 1915, in which the German Army suffered 26,000 casualties.




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