Serving with the 124th was twenty-one-year-old Second Lieutenant Alfred Joubaire, who had marched to Verdun a few days previously behind the regimental band gaily playing Tipperary. For the past fifteen months he had kept a diary which was largely restricted to matter-of-fact, almost flippant observations of life at the front. His entry for May 23rd (one of the last before a shell killed him) ends on a remarkably different note:
Humanity is mad! It must be mad to do what it is doing. What a massacre! What scenes of horror and carnage! I cannot find words to translate my impressions. Hell cannot be so terrible. Men are mad!
Source:
Horne, Alistair. “The Triumvirate.” The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916. New York: St. Martin's, 1963. 239-40. Print.
Further Reading:
No species including ours has a built in inhibitor for population. Men have much less value in a biological sense so when resources are scarce kill the poor ones off. This seems to be the tried and true method. We landed on the MOON 40+ years ago and just sat here not expanding. You seem to be a man of history. Do you see the population bottleneck and the resource wars that are to come?