On the Eastern Front 1914

In the spring of 1915, Sgt. (Wachtmeister) Werner Riess of the Prussian field artillery was recovering from surgery at a military hospital in Wiesbaden, Germany. Referring to his battlefield diary and letters that he had sent home to his wife, while everything was still fresh in his mind he wrote this memoir of his five months fighting on the Eastern Front against the Russians.  As Riess was in a very mobile unit, his memoir offers a personal view of much of Germany’s Eastern Front from 4 August through 31 December 1914, when he returned to Berlin for surgery.        

         Werner Riess related what he did, what he saw, and what he felt. He left us a seemingly honest personal memoir, not edited by the filters and analyses of historical perspective. Because at the time he wrote the memoir Riess still did not know what had transpired out of his sight, the editor added annotation text and a local map to each chapter and included some pertinent material from his wife’s diary. This first edition is in English, but includes a scan of his original memoir in German.