[The following is in regards to the conditions of trench warfare in the First World War – more specifically, what inevitably happens when there are vastly more dead bodies than opportunity to bury them.]
It was safer to wrap the dead up in a canvas and simply roll them over the parapet into the largest shell-hole in the vicinity. There were few of these in which did not float some ghastly, stinking fragment of humanity. On the Right Bank several gullies were dubbed, with good cause, ‘La Ravine de la Mort’ by the French.
[…]
Day after day the German heavies pounded the corpses in this gully, until they were quartered, and re-quartered; to one eye-witness it seemed as if it were filled with dismembered limbs that no one could or would bury. Even when buried,
shells disinter the bodies, then reinter them, chop them to pieces, play with them as a cat plays with a mouse.
As the weather grew warmer and the numbers of dead multiplied, the horror reached new peaks. The compressed area of the battlefield became an open cemetery in which every square foot contained some decomposed piece of flesh:
You found the dead embedded in the walls of the trenches, heads, legs and half-bodies, just as they had been shoveled out of the way by the picks and shovels of the working party.
Source:
Horne, Alistair. “Widening Horizons.” The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916. New York: St. Martin's, 1963. 175, 176. Print.
Further Reading:
No comments, yet...