Willy Hacker noted in his diary during his first days at the Western Front, the result of the first attack he lived through; a French soldier lay dying in front of the German trench:
"Amelie, est - tu la?"
"In just a few hours he will be looking upon Amelie from above.
All of this is so strange and unspeakable. It is impossible to comprehend that surrounded by nature, death is lurking in myriad forms."
That sense of the incomprehensible slaughter that he had been shoved into never left infantryman Willy Hacker. He found evidence of it everywhere he went, of course. Wistful at the loss the war drags in its wake, he mused:
"Perhaps the man who once carved his name and that of his loved one here was hit by a shell a long time ago - just like this tree."
He was not alone. His comrades were likewise overwhelmed with the insanity they were forced to feed: "We lay him down with a large bouquet of French daisies and bluebells on his face".
In "We are the Western Front", an urgent voice from a previous century speaks to us today of the horror and bitterness of war .