The Hell of Verdun
This is from a website called "The Hell of Verdun", recounting the World War I battle. I now live in a suburb called Verdun, and there are some distinct parallels.---
Witnesses of Verdun
A French captain reports: ...I have returned from the most terrible ordeal I have ever witnessed. […] Four days and four nights – ninety-six hours – the last two days in ice-cold mud –without any protection whatsoever except for the narrow trench, which even seemed to be too wide. […] I arrived with 175 men, I returned with 34 of whom several had half turned insane....
A French Lieutenant reports: ...Firstly, companies of skeletons passed, sometimes commanded by a wounded officer, leaning on a stick. All marched, or rather: moved forwards with tiny steps, zigzagging as if drugged. […]
The last note from the diary of Alfred Joubaire, a French soldier: ... I just cannot find the words to express my feelings. Hell cannot be this dreadful. People are insane!...
A German soldier writes to his parents: ...An awful word, Verdun. Numerous people, still young and filled with hope, had to lay here
A soldier tells: A disgusting impenetrable stench surrounded every move. Some did not manage to pull their boots from the mud and had to continue in their socks, puttee or even barefooted....
A witness tells: The bread we ate, the stagnant water we drank… Everything we touched smelled of decomposition …
Henri Barbusse describes:
...a network of elongated pits in which the nightly excreta are piling up. The bottom is covered with a swampy layer from which the feet have to extricate themselves with every step. It smells dreadfully of urine all over....
Louis Barthas also describes:
...At my feet two unlucky creatures rolled the floor in misery.In a fit of insanity the other hummed a tune from his childhood, talked to his wife and his mother and spoke of his village. Tears were in our eyes....
A German officer recalls: We watched as we passed them; they where about twenty. They walked by us as living, plastered statues. Their faces stared at us like shrunken mummies, and their eyes were so immense that you could not see anything but their eyes....
An eye-witness: ... The earth moves and shakes like jelly.
| Posted by chrisdye on August 6, 2003 with category tags of Weblog |
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Written by chrisdye
| Chris Dye |
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