The Bloodstained Western Front

“ . . . he laughed again like a Hungarian primas parading with his kiss curls and inordinately sweet eyes looking up at his public, a wry face that he couldn’t have pulled any better as a grammar-school lad in Bamberg.

Today, he lies buried at Verdun.”

Georg Queri was a journalist when he went to walk the German trenches of the Western Front, observing as he moved along, the death and misery, the comradeship, the “workmanship” of war. With an observant independent eye, only one step removed from the fighting, he captures the tension and excitement of the clashes and everyday incidents that the soldier took for granted. And he does not hesitate to infuse the observations with his own sense of outrage, sadness or wonder. Alongside his patriotism, his reports did not hesitate to highlight the terror of war and the ruin to human lives and countries that it heaved along in its bloodstained wake.

“A few minutes after seven o’clock in the evening they same storming in following the last tremendous hailstorm of shells. They dragged with them everything that would initially be needed in a captured trench: running boards, machine guns, masses of hand grenades, sand sacks. They ran across “no man’s land”, as they had baptised the open area between the two trenches, and died in horrific numbers in this no man’s land”.