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Two sergeants instruct soldiers on the firing range at this sniper school. Sniping required skill and patience as sniper teams, usually consisting of a shooter and a spotter, often waited for long periods of time for targets to appear. Snipers on both sides were notoriously accurate. A head jutting above a trench parapet could be spotted and shot in seconds.
Soldier writing a letter home, 1914.
Letters from home were often painful because of their naïveté. The ironies jumped out at the soldier: “Try not to get wounded!” or “We are having a hard time, too!” “My God! From what?!” was Delvert’s response. The soldier’s sensation, on reading such comments from home, was often one of complete isolation. The troops might as well have been on the moon. They lived and fought in a place beyond understanding, beyond imagination, even beyond feeling. “The Army fights on its own” was Garfield Powell’s conclusion during the Somme offensive.”
-Modris Eksteins, Rite of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age.
…and it was this sort of butcher’s-shop horror, with hot iron reducing the complex and fragile human body in to its component parts that shocked and broke many strong men’s wills.
