"...And then the British artillery opened up. And the corpses, helmets, arms and legs flew about and we were cut to pieces. The losses were staggering.
All of a sudden the enemy fire ceased. Complete silence came over the battlefield.
I looked over the brim of my shell hole and out there came a British soldier with a Red Cross flag which he waved and he was followed by stretcher bearers who came slowly towards us and collected our own wounded.
We got up, still completely dumb from fear of death and helped them to bring our wounded into our trenches.
One hour later a British Army doctor came out, again with a Red Cross flag and he arranged a truce for two hours to let us collect our dead ones. I never forgot this generosity of the British.
Then I thought..what was it that we soldiers stabbed each other, strangled each other, went for each other like mad dogs for? What was it that we, who had nothing against them personally, fought with them to the very end and death?
I felt that the culture we boasted so much about was only a very thin lacquer which chipped off the very moment we come in contact with cruel things like real war. To fire at each other from a distance and to drop bombs is something impersonal..but to see each other’s whites of the eyes and run a bayonet against a man, it was against my conception and against my inner feeling. We were civilised people after all." - Corporal Stefan Westmann, 29th Infantry Division, Imperial German Army, France, December, 1914 #ww1 #reality #stayzero #zerofoxtrot #war