Soldier's Diary: All Quiet On The Western Front

The military life has not treated me well at all, and all of the propaganda about the Germans back home riled me up for a job that I would have never expected. The living conditions here are horrid, and every day I question how I am still living and have enough power left in my body to write this letter. Every day, my friends in my platoon die from either the awful conditions, or they are blown to fractions from enemy shrapnel. Besides the numerous dead bodies, there are large, repulsive rats that feed on the dead bodies of my friends. Since they are so numerous, they’ve gotten bold enough to start stealing our bread. As I write this, our dug-out constantly shakes violently from German bombardment. These tremors keep us awake at night, and we get into corners. The explosions are so often that we are able to tell the difference between calibre’s of each shell. The morning after, the new recruits can sometimes be seen vomiting from the sheer amount of
We don’t have any other pairs of clothes, so we sleep in the same pair of clothes every night. Since we have lice everywhere, we all have to cut our hair short so that it fits in our hats and we even have to scrape the lice off of our hair with the blunt edge of our knives. Our underclothes are always stuck to us from the sweat and the water inside of the trenches. Because our trenches are filled with water, there are a lot of us that have gotten trench foot. Trench foot is when your feet swell up to about two or three times the size of normal feet and they develop gangrene. I could stab my bayonet into my foot and not feel it. Sometimes, if you are lucky enough, the swelling goes down, but you feel the worst pain you have felt in your life. Men are screaming and crying in pain as their legs and feet get amputated. I got lucky, but if I was stuck in that trench for one more day, I fear I would have been too