A period of conditioning on the Verdun battlefield manufactured a callousness towards one’s own wounded, and an apathetic, morbid acceptance of mutilation that seem to us – in our comfy isolation – almost bestial. Captain Delvert, one of the more honest and unpretentious of the French war-writers, describes his shock on approaching the Verdun front for the first time, when his company filed past a man lying with his leg shattered by a shell:
Nobody came to his assistance. One felt that men had become brutalized by the preoccupation of not leaving their company and also not delaying in a place where death was raining down.
In sharp contrast to the revoled and tortured Dubrulle, a young Second Lieutenant Campana recounts how, at the end of his third spell in the line at Verdun, he cold-bloodedly photographed the body of one of his men killed by a shell that hit his own dugout,
laid open from the shoulders to the haunches like a quartered carcass of meat in a butcher’s window.
He sent a copy of the photograph to a friend as a token of what a lucky escape he had had.
Source:
Horne, Alistair. “Widening Horizons.” The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916. New York: St. Martin's, 1963. 187. Print.
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