Several stories high smoke, earth, and debris shot into the air where the biggest shells exploded. The roar of the battle was at times heard 200 kilometers or about 124 miles. Hour after hour, day and night, the thunder of the big guns in what was perhaps the greatest artillery duel in the history of the world, rolled in from around Verdun like the ponderous roaring of gigantic waves continuously breaking on some rockbound shore. On the other side Karl von Wiegand recorded a German officer’s eyewitness account:
It was very difficult to walk about, because the ground was so broken up with the holes made by the shells… The communication trenches no longer existed.”
The observers on aeroplanes or balloons who saw the volcano burst into flame declared that they could not mark on their maps all the batteries that were in action… The commander of a company of light infantry who was wounded in the foot in Caures Wood, stated: “The intensity of the firing was such that when we came out into the open we no longer recognised the country which we had known for four months. Henry Bordeaux, a French novelist who interviewed a number of officers and soldiers about the beginning of the battle and was present for the later phases, wrote: Witnesses struggled to describe what they saw.
0 kommentar(er)
