Hanging on the wire: dead Russian soldiers entangled in barbed wire. Attacking infantry found it nearly impossible to overcome the combination of barbed wire and machine guns. Many died trying, some left hanging in the grip of the wire.
"When morning paled, the strange surroundings gradually revealed themselves to our disbelieving eyes.The defile proved to be little more than a series of enormous craters full of pieces of uniform, weapons and dead bodies; the country around, so far as the eye could see, had been completely ploughed up by heavy shells. Not a single blade of grass showed itself. The churned-up field was gruesome. In among the living defenders lay the dead. When we dug foxholes, we realized that they were stacked in layers. One company after another, pressed together in the drumfire, had been mown down, then the bodies had been buried under showers of earth sent up by shells, and then the relief company had taken their predecessors' place. And now it was our turn.The defile and the land behind was strewn with German dead, the field ahead with British. . . ."
Ernst Jünger in what remained of the German forward trenches on August 25, 1916, the eighth week of the Battle of the Somme. His platoon had moved in overnight, frequently walking on the dead.
Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger, pp. 97–98, copyright © 1920, 1961, Translation © Michael Hoffman, 2003, publisher: Penguin Books, publication date: 2003
1916-08-25, 1916, August, Battle of the Somme, Somme, the Somme, casualties, dead
