"The whole place was full of dead, unburied. In one trench I was lying down on the firing step, and I’d have to peep up every now and again. There were three men buried in the parapet with their legs sticking out, and I had to get hold of their legs to pull myself up just to peer over… They were everywhere, absolutely everywhere, and the flies were feeding on them.
One of the worst trials of trench warfare is to see the dead body of a comrade lying out in the open, gradually fading away before one’s eyes, a mummified hand still clutching the rifle, the helmet a little way off, looking ever so weird in its gruesome surroundings.
There were hundreds of mangled forms, once our fellow-citizens,– arms, legs, heads, scattered disjointedly everywhere; and where all night and all day every fiendish implement of murder falls by the hundred—some half rotted, some newly dead, some still warm, some semi-alive, stranded between foe and friend,– all hurled yards into the air to fall again with a splash of dust, as a rock falls into a lake.
It is the hideous truth, which thousands of men have to witness day and night." - Unknown Diary entry from a British soldier fighting in France. #reality #ww1 #war #stayzero #zerofoxtrot