"I was supposed to go to a certain village and I noticed a small place where there was a mound of stones in the middle of the road. I walked a bit further and I asked a passing convoy 'where is the village?' They said 'You passed through it'. I never found it.
There were no trees left, they had all been destroyed. I saw a foot sticking out of the earth. That's how brutal the bombardments were.
In the trenches, a whole generation of young men crouched to avoid the inferno. Simply lifting your head would mean certain death.
We didn't bury our dead, we put them into the niches that we dug on the trench walls to rest in. When I would creep through the trenches, I didn't know whether I was passing a corpse or a living man. The dead and the living, all had the same gray yellow faces.
We lay in the mud for weeks on end, out in the rain, in that dreadful weather.
The way the man died, some fell forwards, others fell back with their hands in the air, some wanted to talk with their last breath. They screamed as loud as they could, then they slowly grew quiter and quiter until it was over.
It became a living nightmare. Many of us were maimed, driven out of our minds. We died in the mud and muck, amongst rats and corpses. We were shot, burned, blown to pieces. We were fighting everday..every single day. It never stopped." - unknown French soldier describing the fighting in Verdun, France 1916. #reality #war #ww1 #stayzero #zerofoxtrot