"Cheating death was both a matter of luck amid this monstrous avalanche of metal, this veritable curtain of steel and fire, that pounded men into marmalade.
I saw one of those guys who had already taken cover there get hit in the back. Where the connecting trench joined in, an unfortunate fellow was stretched out, decapitated by a shell, just as if he had been guillotined. Beside him, another was frightfully mutilated… I saw, as if hallucinating, a pile of corpses … they had started to bury right in the trench.
I was by myself, at the far end of our little stretch of trench, crouched in a little hole, when a big shell landed like a thunderbolt just three or four meters in front of me. The violence of the blast tore away the tent cloth which I had arranged in front of my hole, to keep out the sun and the flies, and tossed it who knows where. As for me, I had the sense of being knocked flat, and for a few seconds I couldn’t get my breath. I had just felt the death wind. Some say it’s chilly; I found it hot and burning. The fear of being buried alive or lost in the blackness was constant." Cpl. Louis Barthas, 296th Infantry Regiment, May 1916, Verdun, France #stayzero #reality #war #ww1