“We are no longer men here. We are worse than beasts.”

“It is hell let loose.”⁠ ⁠… “It is horrible.”⁠ ⁠… “We’ve lived in misery.”

“If the dear ones at home could see all this perhaps there would be a change. But they are never told.”

“The ceaseless roar of the guns is driving us mad.”

Poor, pitiful letters, out of their cries of agony one gets to the real truth of war⁠—the “glory” and the “splendor” of it preached by the German philosophers and British Jingoes, who upheld it as the great strengthening tonic for their race, and as the noblest experience of men. Every line these German soldiers wrote might have been written by one of ours; from both sides of the shifting lines there was the same death and the same hell.