"
"Enormous masses of ammunition, the like of which no mortal mind
before the war had conceived, were hurled against human beings who
lay, eking out but a bare existence, scattered in shell-holes that
were deep in slime. The terror of it surpassed even that of the shell-
pitted field before Verdun. This was not life; it was agony
unspeakable. And out of the universe of slime the attacker wallowed
forward, slowly but continually, and in dense masses. Time and again
the enemy, struck by the hail of our projectiles in the fore field,
collapsed, and our lonely men in the shell-holes breathed again. Then
the mass came on. Rifle and machine-gun were beslimed. The struggle
was man to man, and--only too often--it was the mass that won.
"What the German soldier accomplished, lived through, and suffered
during the Flanders battle will stand in his honor for all time as a
brazen monument that he set himself with his own hands on enemy soil!
"The enemy's losses, too, were heavy. When, in the spring of 1918, we
occupied the battlefield, it presented a horrible spectacle with its
many unburied dead.
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