Thus the
night is interrupted, and now they come, alarm messages, one after the
other, each more terrifying than the other, of enormous losses through
the bombs and shells of the enemy, of huge masses of troops advancing
upon us, of all possible possibilities, such as a train broken down,
and we are tortured by all the terrors that the mind can invent. Our
nerves quiver. We clench our teeth. None of us can forget the horrors
of the night."
Heavy rain fell and the dugouts became wet and filthy.
"Our sleeping-places were full of water. We had to try and bail out
the trenches with cooking-dishes. I lay down in the water with G-. We
were to have worked on dugouts, but not a soul could do any more. Only
a few sections got coffee. Mine got nothing at all. I was frozen in
every limb, poured the water out of my boots, and lay down again."
Our men suffered exactly the same things, but did not write about
them.
The German generals and their staffs could not be quite indifferent to
all this welter of human suffering among their troops, in spite of the
cold, scientific spirit with which they regarded the problem of war.
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