The sort of thing which must lie behind Canto 16
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Witnesses of Verdun
A French captain reports: ...I have returned from the most terrible
ordeal I have ever witnessed. […] Four days and four nights - ninety-six
hours - the last two days in ice-cold mud - kept under relentless fire,
without any protection whatsoever except for the narrow trench, which
even seemed to be too wide. […] I arrived with 175 men, I returned with
34 of whom several had half turned insane....
A French Lieutenant reports: ...Firstly, companies of skeletons passed,
sometimes commanded by a wounded officer, leaning on a stick. All
marched, or rather: moved forwards with tiny steps, zigzagging as if
drugged. […] It seemed as if these speechless faces cried over something
appalling: the unbelievable horrors of their martyrdom....
The last note from the diary of Alfred Joubaire, a French soldier:
...They must be crazy to do what they are doing now: what a bloodbath,
what horrid images, what a slaughter. I just cannot find the words to
express my feelings. Hell cannot be this dreadful. People are insane!...
A German soldier writes to his parents: ...An awful word, Verdun.
Numerous people, still young and filled with hope, had to lay down their
lives here - their mortal remains decomposing somewhere, in between
trenches, in mass graves, at cemeteries....
Louis Barthas recounts the bitter man-to-man fights: ...Woe betide
anyone who fell into the hands of the enemy alive; all sense of humanity
had disappeared. Soldiers, wounded, stretcher-bearers - a distinction
was no longer made....
An eye-witness: ...One soldier was going insane with thirst and drank
from a pond covered with a greenish layer near Le Mort-Homme. A corpse
was afloat in it; his black countenance face down in the water and his
abdomen swollen as if he had been filling himself up with water for days
now....
A soldier tells: ...The soldiers put their feet in front of them and
pulled up out of the swampy and smelly soil. A disgusting impenetrable
stench surrounded every move. Some did not manage to pull their boots
from the mud and had to continue in their socks, puttee or even
barefooted....
A French soldier describes the horrors of a bombardment: ...When you
hear the whistling in the distance your entire body preventively
crunches together to prepare for the enormous explosions. Every new
explosion is a new attack, a new fatigue, a new affliction. Even nerves
of the hardest of steel, are not capable of dealing with this kind of
pressure. The moment comes when the blood rushes to your head, the fever
burns inside your body and the nerves, numbed with tiredness, are not
capable of reacting to anything anymore. It is as if you are tied to a
pole and threatened by a man with a hammer. First the hammer is swung
backwards in order to hit hard, then it is swung forwards, only missing
your scull by an inch, into the splintering pole. In the end you just
surrender. Even the strength to guard yourself from splinters now fails
you. There is even hardly enough strength left to pray to God....
A witness tells: ...We all carried the smell of dead bodies with us. The
bread we ate, the stagnant water we drank… Everything we touched smelled
of decomposition due to the fact that the earth surrounding us was
packed with dead bodies....
Henri Barbusse describes the trenches as: ...a network of elongated pits
in which the nightly excreta are piling up. The bottom is covered with a
swampy layer from which the feet have to extricate themselves with every
step. It smells dreadfully of urine all over....
A French stretcher-bearer describes the consequences of a flame-thrower
attack: ...Some grenadiers returned with ghastly wounds: hair and
eyebrows singed, almost not human anymore, black creatures with
bewildered eyes....
Louis Barthas also describes such an attack: ...At my feet two unlucky
creatures rolled the floor in misery. Their clothes and hands, their
entire bodies were on fire. They were living torches. [The next day] In
front of us on the floor the two I had witnessed ablaze, lay rattling.
They were so unrecognisably mutilated that we could not decide on their
identities. Their skin was black entirely. One of them died that same
night. In a fit of insanity the other hummed a tune from his childhood,
talked to his wife and his mother and spoke of his village. Tears were
in our eyes....
A soldier tells: ...Seven days without sleep, seven days of fatigue,
thirst and fear made these healthy men, these beautifully disciplined
companies into a gang of loiterers. Critically ill, but calm and
satisfied, because they were now out of danger and appeared to be still
alive....
A German officer recalls: ...We saw a handful of soldiers, commanded by
a Captain, slowly approaching, one at the time. The Captain asked which
company we were and then started to cry all of a sudden. Did he suffer
of shellshock? Then he said: ...when I saw you approach it reminded me
of six days ago, when I walked this same road with approximately hundred
men. And now look how few there are left.... We watched as we passed
them; they where about twenty. They walked by us as living, plastered
statues. Their faces stared at us like shrunken mummies, and their eyes
were so immense that you could not see anything but their eyes....
A German soldier describes: ...The men who have lived in these trenches
just as long as our infantry men, without going insane under these
infernal attacks, must have lost their sense for a large number of
things. Our poor men have seen too many atrocities, have witnessed too
many incredible matters. I cannot believe that we will be able to cope
with this. Our poor little mind simply cannot comprehend all of this....
An eye-witness: ...There is nothing as tiring as the continuous,
enormous bombardment as we have lived through, last night, at the front.
The night is disturbed by light as clear as if it were day. The earth
moves and shakes like jelly. And the men who are still at the frontline,
cannot hear anything but the drumfire, the moaning of wounded friends,
the screams of hurt horses, the wild pounding of their own hearts, hour
after hour, day after day, night after night....
A German soldier: ...the soldiers fell over like tin soldiers. Almost
all our officers get hurt or killed and many of our men get killed
because of their own artillery fire, which is too close and therefore
causes many victims...
A French soldier: ...my battalion comes straight from the land behind
the front-lines, the men are exhausted and did not sleep. The battalion
consists of 800 men - the battalion that we are here to replace lost 800
men...
A German eye-witness: ...The losses are registered as follows: they are
dead, wounded, missing, nervous wrecks, ill and exhausted. Nearly all
suffer from dysentery. Because of the failing provisioning the men are
forced to use up their emergency rations of salty meats. They quenched
their thirst with water from the shellholes. They are stationed in the
village of Ville where every form of care seems to be missing. They have
to build their own accommodation and are given a little cacao to stop
the diarrhoea. The latrines, wooden beams hanging over open holes, are
occupied day and night - the holes are filled with slime and blood...
A neutral contemporary feels: …that they, within the framework of this
World War, are involved in some affair, that will still be considered
horrible and appalling in a hundred years time. It is this Hell of
Verdun. Since a hundred days - day and night - the sons of two European
people fight stubbornly and bitterly over every inch of land. It is the
most appalling mass murder of our history…
A soldier: …One of the trenches is so filled with wounded and dead
bodies the attackers have to use the parapet in order to be able to move
forward…
A German witness: ….the latrines cause major problems. They are
completely blocked up and smell terribly. This stench is fought with
chlorinated lime and this smell mixes with the battlefield smell of
decomposition. Men even wear their gas masks when using the latrines…
A French eye-witness: …mud, heat, thirst, filth, rats, the sweat smell
of corpses, the disgusting smell of excreta and the terrible fear: 'it
seems we will have to attack', and that when nobody has any strength
left...
A German soldier: …and during the summer months the swarms of flies
around the corpses and the stench, that horrible stench. If we had to
construct trenches we put garlic cloves in our nostrils…
An eye-witness: … you could never get rid of the horrible stench. If we
were on leave and we were having a drink somewhere, it would only last a
few minutes before the people at the table beside us would stand up and
leave. It was impossible to endure the horrible stench of Verdun...
A German officer: …the number of defectors increases, the front soldiers
become numb by seeing the bodies without heads, without legs, shot
through the belly, with blown away foreheads, with holes in their
chests, hardly recognisable flab's, pale and dirty in the thick yellow
brown mud, which covers the battle field…
A French soldier: …everyone who searches for cover in a shell hole,
stumbles across slippery, decomposing bodies and has to proceed with
smelly hands and smelly clothes…
A German soldier: …in the drumfire bravery no longer exists: only
nerves, nerves, nerves. When anyone is exposed unto such trials and
tribulations he is no longer of any use as an attacker or defender…
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