“The bodies were laid close together in order to fully utilize the available space. The bottom of the grave was large enough for 23 bodies.
A Sergeant, who was standing near, observed that one of the "dead" was still alive. He had seen the "corpse" move the fingers of his right hand.
On closer examination, it turned out that we came close to bury a living man. It took us 2 hours to restore him back to consciousness.
The officer who supervised the work turned to the two soldiers charged with getting the corpses ready and asked them whether they were sure that all the men buried were really dead. "Yes," the two replied, "we suppose they are all dead.”
That seemed to be quite sufficient for that humane officer, for he ordered the interments to proceed. Nobody doubted that there were several more, among the 138 men whom were buried that morning, whose life had not entirely drained.
To be buried alive was just one of those horrors of the battlefield.
We common soldiers were here handling the dead and wounded as if we had never done anything else, and yet in our civilian lives, most of us had an abhorrence and fear of the dead and the horribly mangled.
The dead were still able to speak to us with extreme vivacity. We knew what they wanted to express, for their gestures and facial expressions were very eloquent. They expressed gratitude for the charitable service we were rendering them, and like us, they did not seem to understand how men could kill each other, inflict pain on each other.
War is a hard school-master who bends and reshapes his pupils.” - Private Julius Koettgen, No.30 Sapper BN, Imperial German Army, Attigny, France, 1915.
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