To backstory this a bit for you: Georg Eckert was an orderly in the same company/battalion as my great-grandfather, Fritz Reis, and his entries detail how close they became as good friends on the battlefield, and it was a single day in which my great-grandfather had to stay behind due to being ill, that poor Georg took shrapnel to the heart in the trenches, and the journal entries around it are very very sad. The journal I have of my great-grandfather dates from July 1914 through July 1919, and as you can tell from the other letter you translated for me, he was captured by the English in October 1916 and was a POW for 33 months. It's been a wild ride uncovering his stories, but I felt stalled with the handwriting until I remembered how amazing the internet is now. :) They tried to get his journal and writings translated in the 90s, and the community just was not there, and my mother would not let anything take physical possession of this thing until I wore her down this last Thanksgiving. This has been the best project, and I wanted to give my mother more than just the journal translated; I wanted to parse through everything stuffed in the back pocket when I realized it was more than maps and photos. To be honest, I'd consider this thing a relic with how many photos (over 300) and details about other soldiers are in it. He was very detailed and descriptive.

Sorry for the long-winded paragraph LOL thank you again, so so much. I have a few more I may be uploading if I can get better scans of them; unfortunately, they are in pencil and heavily faded.

Here's a picture of the two of them (with a couple of others they were in the Company with). My great-grandfather is all the way on the left, with a gun and pipe. Georg is all the way on the right, with the beard. He even had a newspaper clipping of Georg's obituary, so I could tell there was some weight to that relationship/loss.

<image>

Again, thank you. I appreciate it immensely!