A German soldier writes to his parents: ...An awful word, Verdun. Numerous people, still young and filled with hope, had to lay down their lives here – their mortal remains decomposing somewhere, in between trenches, in mass graves, at cemeteries...

An eye-witness: ...One soldier was going insane with thirst and drank from a pond covered with a greenish layer near Le Mort-Homme. A corpse was afloat in it; his black countenance face down in the water and his abdomen swollen as if he had been filling himself up with water for days now...

oldier tells: ..The soldiers put their feet in front of them and pulled up out of the swampy and smelly soil. A disgusting impenetrable stench surrounded every move. Some did not manage to pull their boots from the mud and had to continue in their socks, puttee or even barefooted...

A witness tells: ...We all carried the smell of dead bodies with us. The bread we ate, the stagnant water we drank… Everything we touched smelled of decomposition due to the fact that the earth surrounding us was packed with dead bodies...

Henri Barbusse describes the trenches as: ...a network of elongated pits in which the nightly excreta are piling up. The bottom is covered with a swampy layer from which the feet have to extricate themselves with every step. It smells dreadfully of urine all over...

A French soldier: ...my battalion comes straight from the land behind the front-lines, the men are exhausted and did not sleep. The battalion consists of 800 men - the battalion that we are here to replace lost 800 men...

A French soldier: ...everyone who searches for cover in a shell hole, stumbles across slippery, decomposing bodies and has to proceed with smelly hands and smelly clothes...

A German soldier: ...in the drumfire bravery no longer exists: only nerves, nerves, nerves. When anyone is exposed unto such trials and tribulations he is no longer of any use as an attacker or defender...