We are the Infantry

In We are the Infantry, the first days of mobilisation in August 1914 through to the hell of Verdun in 1916 and the great Second Battle of the Marne in 1918, when the Germans gradually realise that they might lose the war, are all vividly captured in Friedrich Lehmann’s WWI diary. 

Recording his experiences and thoughts as he moves along the front-line German trenches, Lehmann’s diary takes us through to his own final Armageddon when a shell that tears his comrades to shreds leaves him so seriously injured and unable to move that he  can do nothing but wait for death.

How he cheats that final departure, and the touching memory of his father’s gentle care for his incapacitated son, is part of the moving story of We are the Infantry.