"It was full of corpses. Dead Englishman, lines and lines of them and with their eyes wide open. We all stopped talking. I'd never seen a dead men before and here I was looking at two or three hundred of them. It was our first fear. Nobody had mentioned this. I was very shocked... We set to work to bury people. We pushed them into the sides of the trench but bits of them kept getting uncovered and sticking out, like people in a badly made bed. Hands where the worst; they would escape from the sand pointing, begging, even waving. There was one which we all shook when we passed saying 'Good Morning' in a posh voice. Everybody did it. The bottom of the trench was springy like a mattress because of all the bodies underneath." - Private Leonard Thompson, British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, Gallipoli, August 1915 #ww1 #reality #war #stayzero #zerofoxtrot #trenchlife