act, and a warning of what punishment
may be meted out:

"Proofs are multiplying of men leaving the position without permission
and hiding at the rear. It is our duty... each at his post--to deal with
this fact with energy and success."

Many Bavarians complained that their officers did not accompany them
into the trenches, but went down to the hospitals with imaginary
diseases. In any case there was a great deal of real sickness, mental
and physical. The ranks were depleted by men suffering from fever,
pleurisy, jaundice, and stomach complaints of all kinds, twisted up with
rheumatism after lying in waterlogged holes, lamed for life by bad cases
of trench-foot, and nerve-broken so that they could do nothing but weep.

The nervous cases were the worst and in greatest number. Many men went
raving mad. The shell-shock victims clawed at their mouths unceasingly,
or lay motionless like corpses with staring eyes, or trembled in every
limb, moaning miserably and afflicted with a great terror.

To the Germans (barely less to British troops) the Somme battlefields
were not only shambles, but a territory which the devil claimed as his
own for the torture of men's brains and souls before they died in the
furnace fires. A spirit of revolt against all this crept into the minds
of men who retained their sanity--a revolt against the people who had
ordained this vast outrage against God and humanity.

Into German letters there crept bitter, burning words against "the
millionaires--who grow rich out of the war," against the high people
who live in comfort behind the lines. Letters from home inflamed these
thoughts.

It was not good reading for men under shell-fire.

"It seems that you soldiers fight so that official stay-at-homes can
treat us as female criminals. Tell me, dear husband, are you a criminal
when you fight in the trenches, or why do people treat women and
children here as such?...

"For the poor here it is terrible, and yet the rich, the gilded ones,
the bloated aristocrats, gobble up everything in front of our very
eyes... All soldiers--friend and foe--ought to throw down their weapons
and go on strike, so that this war which enslaves the people more than
ever may cease."

Thousands of letters, all in this strain, were reaching the German
soldiers on the Somme, and they did not strengthen the morale of men
already victims of terror and despair.

Behind the lines deserters were shot in batches. To those in fron