A German prisoner of the Great War

As our commemoration of the Great War continues, a perspective from the German side.

In the newspapers you read: ‘Peacefully they rest on the spot where they have bled and suffered, while the guns roar over their graves, taking vengeance for their heroic death.’ And it doesn’t occur to anybody that the enemy is also firing; that the shells plunge into the hero’s grave; that his bones are mingled with the filth which they scatter to the four winds – and that, after a few weeks, the mass closes over the last resting place of the soldier. Kanonier Gerhardt Gürtler 111th Bavarian Corps Artillery

From Ordeal by Fire. Lyn Macdonald.1988, 2001

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