"The battlefield is fearful. One is overcome be 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. 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. 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 #ww1 #reality #war #military #history