A photo postcard of a German trench view of barbed wire and a dead patrol. Dated February 22, 1916, and field postmarked the next day, the message is from a soldier to his uncle, and reads in part, 'yesterday we heard that 4 fortresses of Verdun were taken. This have been a lot of shooting . . . Maybe this is the end of Verdun and peace will come soon . . . the barbed wire on the other side of the card is French. You can see dead patrols . . .' (Translation from the German courtesy Thomas Faust.) Evidently the author safely reached the French trench line.
Reverse:France Feb 22 1916 - Dear Uncle, yesterday we have heard that 4 fortresses of Verdun were taken. This have been a lot of shooting ... Maybe this is the end of Verdun and peace will come soon ... the barbed wire on the other side of the card is French. You can see dead patrols ... (Translation from the German courtesy Thomas Faust (Ebay's Urfaust).)
"I was a mere boy looking on life with hopeful optimism, and on war as an interesting adventure. When I saw the Hun corpses killed by our shell-fire I was full of pity for the men so suddenly cut off in their prime. Now I was a man with no hope of the War ending for years. I looked at a trench full of corpses without any sensation whatever. Neither pity nor fear that I might soon be one myself, nor anger against their killers. Nothing stirred me. I was just a machine carrying out my appointed work to the best of my ability."
British infantryman Alfred Pollard writing on February 7, 1917. Pollard found the trench of dead British soldiers, slain in a German night raid, while leading a patrol of four men to reconnoiter the village of Grandcourt on the Ancre River. Aerial reconnaissance had reported German forces had pulled back from the village, and Pollard's mission was to verify the reports. Pollard found the village empty. Neither he nor his superiors realized they were seeing the first stages of a German strategic retreat.
The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War by Peter Englund, page 330, copyright © 2009 by Peter England, publisher: Vintage Books, publication date: 2012
1917-02-07, 1917, February, dead
