"I was digging a trench when my pick-axe became entangled in a bundle of slime. On the end were human entrails — all that was left of a dead man buried there by a previous bombardment.
Until then, I had seen the dead without really seeing them, like figures in a waxworks. But now the words closed upon my brain like a vice. A dead man. They choked my throat and chilled my heart. All these corpses had been men who breathed as I breathed, had had a father, a mother, a woman whom they loved, a piece of land which was theirs, faces which expressed joy and suffering, which had known the light of day and the colour of the sky.
It was a moment of realization. After that, I could never pass a dead man without stopping to gaze on his face. And I would ask, who were you? Where was your home? Who is mourning for you? But I never asked who was to blame. Each had defended his own country; the Germans Germany, the Frenchmen France; they had done their duty." Ernst Toller, 1st Bavarian Foot Artillery Reg, Verdun, France, 1916. #stayzero #zerofoxtrot #reality