It was indeed not very exalting to watch wounded comrades-in-arms die where they lay because they could not be removed. One Divisional Chaplain, Abbé Thellier de Poncheville, recalls the spectacle of a horse, still harnessed to its wagon, struggling in the mud of a huge crater. ‘He had been there for two nights, sinking deeper and deeper,’ but the troops, obsessed by their own suffering, passed by without so much as casting a glance at the wretched beast. The fact was that the daily inoculation of horror had begun to make men immune to sensation. Duhamel explains:
A short time ago death was the cruel stranger, the visitor with the flannel footsteps… today, it is the mad dog in the house… One eats, one drinks beside the dead, one sleeps in the midst of the dying, one laughs and one sings in the company of corpses… The frequentation of death which makes life so precious also finishes, sometimes, by giving one a distaste for it, and more often, lassitude.
Source:
Horne, Alistair. “Widening Horizons.” The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916. New York: St. Martin's, 1963. 186-87. Print.
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