"I don't make hell for nobody. I'm only the instrument of a laughing providence. Sometimes I don't like it myself, but I couldn't help it if I was born smart."
1st Sgt. Milton Anthony Warden.
"From here to Eternity"
Paul Valery
"You are in love with intelligence, until it frightens you. For your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time."
The Wisdom of the Ages
"When a young man, I read somewhere the following: God the Almighty said, 'All that is too complex is unnecessary, and it is simple that is needed'," Mikhail Kalashnikov
"Here lies the bravest soldier I've seen since my mirror got grease on it."
Zapp Brannigan
Attn. Gun Geeks...
What's wrong with this picture?
4 comments:
He's holding a Russian/Soviet Nagant rifle!
Not German!
Damn! That didn't take long.
You're right. The dashing young man in the Stahlhelm is holding a Moisin Nagant M91.
He's Estonian and here, straight from the "mind" of Wikipedia, is a partial explanation:
"Following the Bolshevik takeover of power in Russia after the October Revolution of 1917 and German victories against the Russian army, between the Russian Red Army's retreat and the arrival of advancing German troops, the Committee of Elders of the Maapäev issued the Estonian Declaration of Independence [4] in Pärnu on February 24, 1918."
My assumption was that he was a German from a regiment with a not very important assignment and they had been issued captured weapons to save the front line weapons for the main front.
I would not have picked up on the Estonian angle.
WWI Boche holding a 1891 Nagant?
MoE
Dangit. Oh well, I thought I was S-M-R-T.
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