[Jims5543]

For anyone interested. This cat puts up pics and letter from soldiers, many from WW1 and a lot from WW2.

https://www.instagram.com/zulufucxs/

i.e.

"From the darkness on all sides came the groans and wails of wounded men; faint, long, sobbing moans of agony and despairing shrieks.

It was too horribly obvious that dozens of men with serious wounds must have crawled for safety into new shell-holes and now the water was rising about them and powerless to move they were slowly drowning.

The cries of the wounded men had much diminished now, and as we staggered down the road, the reason was only too apparent for the water was right over the tops of the shell-holes.

Down the road we staggered, shells bursting around us. A man stopped dead in front of me, and I cursed him and butted him with my knee. Very gently he said, 'I’m blind, sir,' and turned to show me his eyes and nose torn away by a piece of shell.
He then he asked for a cigarette. I produced one and put it between his lips; I struck a match and held it across, but the cigarette had fallen and he was dead.

I hardly recognised the boilerhouse for it had been hit by shell after shell and at its entrance was a long mound of bodies.

I had to climb over them to enter HQ. I was alone in my tent which I entered soaked in mud and blood from head to foot." - Captain Edwin Vaughan, 1/8th battalion, Royal Warwickshire Regiment, Battle of Passchendaele, Belgium, September, 1917. #reality #ww1

“To die from a bullet seems to be nothing; parts of our being remain intact; but to be dismembered, torn to pieces, reduced to pulp, this is the fear that flesh cannot support and which is fundamentally the great suffering of the bombardment. Men were squashed. Cut in two or divided from top to bottom. Blown into showers; bellies turned inside out; skulls forced into the chest as if by a blow from a club. You eat beside the dead; you drink beside the dead, you relieve yourself beside the dead and you sleep beside the dead. People will read that the front line was Hell. How can people begin to know what that one word – Hell – means.” - Unknown French Soldier, diary entry, conditions in Verdun, France 1916. #ww1 #reality #ww1 #war #zerofoxtrot #stayzero

"There were bodies, both our own and German, from the first wave. It was sickening to see your own dead and wounded, some crying for stretcher-bearers, others semi-conscious and others beyond all hope.
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We were sitting amid a sea of shell holes, up to our knees in gluey, sticky mud. The stench of rotting bodies was terrible. The bodies of the dead and of the wounded would sink out of sight. This was all mud, mud and more mud, mixed together with blood.
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You just had to go forward through all that mud and blood. It was absolutely sickening. I remember one lad from our regiment in particular. He was in a pool of blood, ripped open from his shoulder to his waist by shrapnel. When we got to him he said, 'Shoot me. But before we could draw a revolver, he was dead. And the final word he uttered was 'Mother'. It wasn't a cry of despair, it was a cry of surprise and joy. His mother was in the next world to welcome him and he knew it. .
We lived hour by hour. You saw the sun rise, hopefully you'd see it set. If you saw it set, you hoped you'd see it rise. Some men would, some wouldn't.

At the end, we fought for a few yards of soil and that cost the lives of so many, including my three best friends. There was no excuse for such slaughter for so little gain." - Pvt. Henry John Patch, Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry, Passchendaele, Belgium Sept 22, 1917.