"Perhaps you would like to know something of the spirit of the men out here now. Well, the truth is every man is fed up almost past bearing, and not a single one has an ounce of what we call patriotism left in him. All that every man desires now is to get done with it and go home. Now that's the honest truth, and any man who has been out here within the last few months will tell you the same.
I've been at the front for months, and my sharpest perceptions have become dulled. The war has become an everyday affair; life in the line a matter of routine; instead of heroes there are only victims; conscripts instead of volunteers, life has become hell; we are all cogs in a great machine which sometimes rolls forward, nobody knows where, sometimes backwards, nobody knows why. We have lost our enthusiasm, our courage, the very sense of our identity; there is no rhyme or reason in all this slaughtering and devastation; pain itself has lost its meaning; the earth is a barren waste.
I simply want to get away from the mass, from mass-living and mass-dying." - Unknown soldier, letter from the Western Front, France, dated Feb 5th, 1918 #reality #war #ww1 #hardcore #stayzero #zerofoxtrot