One sees horrible pictures--here an arm, here a foot, here a head,
sticking out of the earth. And these are all German soldiers-heroes!
"Not far from us, at the entrance to a dugout, nine men were buried,
of whom three were dead. All along the trench men kept on getting
buried. What had been a perfect trench a few hours before was in parts
completely blown in . . . The men are getting weaker. It is impossible
to hold out any longer. Losses can no longer be reckoned accurately.
Without a doubt many of our people are killed."
That is only one out of thousands of such gruesome pictures, true as
the death they described, true to the pictures on our side of the line
as on their side, which went back to German homes during the battles
of the Somme. Those German soldiers were great letter-writers, and men
sitting in wet ditches, in "fox-holes," as they called their dugouts,
"up to my waist in mud," as one of them described, scribbled pitiful
things which they hoped might reach their people at home, as a voice
from the dead.
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