"The injured men between the trenches died wretched deaths; no one dared to go through enemy fire and help them. They perished slowly; very slowly. After many hours, there was nothing but whimpering from a few men; they went to sleep one after the other, never to wake again."
This new edition of "A German Soldier Remembers" published in English for the first time in over one hundred years, is an extraordinary account of WWI trench warfare. Anyone who survived the inhumanity of the front lines in the Great War was mentally scarred for the rest of his life as mankind's highest ideals were trodden into the filth in a conflict in which every base instinct, every aggressive emotion that could be summoned, was necessary to stay alive for just one more day, one more hour.
And yet there was more that united the fighting soldiers on all sides than separated them. The contempt for many of the officers, for example, who "... kept themselves alive for the fatherland", as the author scathingly remarks.
In his unsparing description of trench warfare the author appeals to us from an era long past, reaching out to future generations; in his detailing of the terrors he went through, lies also the hope that such insanity would not be repeated. "A German Soldier Remembers" is also a question mark thrown up by the frontline soldier; for whom was this war really fought?
