The news was brought down from the Somme front by Red Cross trains,
arriving in endless succession, and packed with maimed and mangled
men. German military policemen formed cordons round the railway
stations, pushed back civilians who came to stare with somber eyes at
these blanketed bundles of living flesh, but when the ambulances
rumbled through the streets toward the hospitals--long processions of
them, with the soles of men's boots turned up over the stretchers on
which they lay quiet and stiff--the tale was told, though no word was
spoken.
The tale of defeat, of great losses, of grave and increasing anxiety,
was told clearly enough--as I read in captured letters--by the faces
of German officers who went about in these towns behind the lines with
gloomy looks, and whose tempers, never of the sweetest, became
irritable and unbearable, so that the soldiers hated them for all this
cursing and bullying. A certain battalion commander had a nervous
breakdown because he had to meet his colonel in the morning.
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