Inside a German trench
By Lothar Dietz, soldier and philosophy student, November, 1914. Letter home from a dugout in the trenches on Hill 59; 2 miles south-east of Ypres ...
You at home can't have the faintest idea of what it means to us when in the newspaper it simply and blandly says: "In Flanders today again only artillery activity." Far better go over the top in the most foolhardy attack, cost what it may, than stick it out all day long under shell-fire, wondering all the time whether the next one will maim one or blow one to bits.
For the last three hours, a corporal has been lying groaning on my right, here in the dugout, with one arm and both legs shattered by a shell. Anyone who is badly wounded generally dies while he is being got out of here ...
Only 60 yards away from us are the English, and they are very much on the alert as they would be only too glad to get back our hill. Six hundred yards behind here is our reserve position, a little wooded valley in which the most frightful hand-to-hand fighting has taken place. Trees and bushes are torn to pieces by shells and larded with rifle bullets. All about in the shell holes are still lying bodies, though we have already buried many.
As one can't possibly feel happy in a place where all nature has been devastated, we have done our best to improve things. First we built quite a neat causeway of logs, with a railing to it, along the bottom of the valley. Then, from a pine wood close by which had also been destroyed by shells, we dragged all the best tree-tops and stuck them upright in the ground; certainly they have no roots, but we don't expect to be here more than a month and they are sure to stay green that long. Out of the gardens of the ruined châteaux of Hollebecke and Camp we fetched rhododendrons, box, snowdrops and primroses, and made quite nice little flower-beds.
We have cleaned out the little brook which flows through the valley, and some clever comrades have built little dams and constructed pretty little water-mills - so-called "parole-clocks", which, by their revolutions, are supposed to count how many minutes more the war is going to last. We have planted whole bushes of willow and hazel with pretty catkins on them and little firs with their roots, so that a melancholy desert is transformed into an idyllic grove.
Every dugout has its board carved with a name suited to the situation: "Villa-Woodland-Peace", "Heart of the Rhine", "Eagle's Nest", etc. Luckily there is no lack of birds, especially thrushes, which have now got used to the whistling of bullets and falling of shells. They wake us in the morning with their cheerful twittering.
• From German Students' War Letters, edited by Philipp Witkop (published by Pine Street Books, 2002). Lothar Dietz was born in 1889 in Pegau and studied philosophy in Leipzig before going to the front. He was killed on April 15 1915, near Ypres.