"The battlefield is fearful. One is overcomed by a peculiar sour, heavy and penetrating smell of corpses. Rising over a plank bridge you find that its middle is supported only by the body of a long dead horse. Men that were killed last October lie half in swamp and half in the yellow sprouting beet fields.
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The legs of an Englishman, still encased in puttees, stick out into a trench, the corpse still being built into the parapet; a soldier hangs his rifle on them. A little brook runs through the trench, and everyone uses the water they have. Nobody minds the pale Englishman who is rotting away a few steps farther up. In Langemark cemetery a mound has been piled up, for the dead must have lain about ground-level.
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At one point I saw twenty-two dead horses, still harnessed, accompanied by a few dead drivers. Cattle and pigs lie about, half rotten; broken trees, avenues razed to the ground; crater upon crater in the roads and in the fields. Such is a six months' old battlefield." - Rudolf Binning, Jungdeutschland Division, Ypres, Belgium, 1914 #war #reality #nosafespaces #ww1 #stayzero #zerofoxtrot