been smashed in
and only shell-craters could be found.

"In the front line of Flers," wrote one of these Germans, "the men
were only occupying shell-holes. Behind there was the intense smell of
putrefaction which filled the trench--almost unbearably. The corpses lie
either quite insufficiently covered with earth on the edge of the trench
or quite close under the bottom of the trench, so that the earth lets
the stench through. In some places bodies lie quite uncovered in a
trench recess, and no one seems to trouble about them. One sees horrible
pictures--here an arm, here a foot, here a head, sticking out of the
earth. And these are all German soldiers-heroes!

"Not far from us, at the entrance to a dugout, nine men were buried, of
whom three were dead. All along the trench men kept on getting
buried. What had been a perfect trench a few hours before was in parts
completely blown in... The men are getting weaker. It is impossible
to hold out any longer. Losses can no longer be reckoned accurately.
Without a doubt many of our people are killed."

That is only one out of thousands of such gruesome pictures, true as the
death they described, true to the pictures on our side of the line as
on their side, which went back to German homes during the battles of the
Somme. Those German soldiers were great letter-writers, and men sitting
in wet ditches, in "fox-holes," as they called their dugouts, "up to my
waist in mud," as one of them described, scribbled pitiful things which
they hoped might reach their people at home, as a voice from the dead.
For they had had little hope of escape from the blood--bath. "When you
get this I shall be a corpse," wrote one of them, and one finds the same
foreboding in many of these documents.

Even the lucky ones who could get some cover from the incessant
bombardment by English guns began to lose their nerves after a day or
two. They were always in fear of British infantry sweeping upon them
suddenly behind the Trommelfeuer, rushing their dugouts with bombs and
bayonets. Sentries became "jumpy," and signaled attacks when there were
no attacks. The gas--alarm was sounded constantly by the clang of a
bell in the trench, and men put on their heavy gas-masks and sat in them
until they were nearly stifled.

Here is a little picture of life in a German dugout near the British
lines, written by a man now dead:

"The telephone bell rings. 'Are you there? Yes, here's Nau's battalion.'
'Good. Tha