In Europe

Cross. Boys of that age were apparently being sent to the front.
    By late 1915 the number of Allied soldiers who had been killed orwounded on the Western Front amounted to more than two million. The Germans had lost 900,000. The field hospitals on both sides of the front resembled meat-processing plants. In Berlin I stumbled upon the story of the Jewish hospital train
Viktoria Louise
, dispatched by the Jüdisches Krankenhaus with the best surgeons on board. The train even had its own operating car. More than 100,000 of the country's 500,000 Jews fought in the war, proportionally more than of any other ethnic group. The war brought equality at last. That, however, is not how the German military staff saw it: in late 1916, orders were passed down that all Jews were to be registered separately. About 15,000 German Jews died in the war.
    Everywhere the troops were weakened by malnutrition, shelling and the grim conditions in the trenches, but life was harder on the Allied side. The Germans, bent on defending their positions, dug in solidly. The French and British positions still to be seen today resemble little more than overgrown ditches. During the winter months they were mostly muddy, stinking, open sewers along which soldiers were shuttled back and forth, without much in the way of rest and with almost no protection. Corporal Barthas kept careful note of where he slept during those years: in a cellar, on the podium of a ballroom, in a pigsty, beneath a tarpaulin on a street, in a church, in a draughty attic, under a cart, in the ruins of a house and often simply in a hole in the ground. Notorious among the British was ‘trench foot’, a condition caused by weeks of walking around in wet footwear. The disease caused the feet to swell, after which the skin changed colour, the toes died and the feet had to be amputated.
    The troops suffered from mental problems as well, something mentioned in every war diary. According to Ernst Jünger, the roar of a nonstop nocturnal artillery attack was so disturbing that soldiers would forget their own names or how to count to three. He likened the permanent fear of death to a sense of being tied up and having someone swing a sledgehammer past your head again and again, knowing that your skull could be smashed any moment. Towards the end of the war he lost almost half his company, more than sixty men, to one direct hit. The seasoned veteran Jünger broke down and cried in front of the survivors.
    Barthas described a trench immediately after a direct hit: a decapitated soldier, a badly mutilated body, a pile of German corpses, the dead bodyof a young soldier who looked as though he were asleep, a few survivors staring apathetically into space. Then, suddenly another round came in: ‘The trench was aflame … I heard whistling and cracking, but also terrible screams of pain. Sergeant Vergès’ eyes were burned. Two poor bastards were rolling around on the ground at my feet … they had been turned into human torches.’ He himself blacked out. ‘They say I was staring vacantly and talking gibberish.’
    Nervous collapses were so common that each army had its own term for them. The Belgians called it ‘
d'n klop
’, the Germans spoke of ‘
Kriegsneurose
’ or ‘
Granatfieber
’, the French called it ‘
choque traumatique
’, but in the end the English phrase ‘shell shock’ was adopted for the phenomenon. Whatever the language, the symptoms remained the same: uncontrollable weeping, extreme fatigue and panic attacks. Foot soldiers were also subject to a hysterical form of shell shock, accompanied by paralysis, muteness, deafness and facial tics.
    At the town hall in Poperinge one can still view the cells reserved for soldiers charged with ‘desertion’ and ‘cowardice’. According to a secret British Army directive, the only proper punishment for cowardice was death, and medical reasons were not considered extenuating. Later studies of court documents have shown that many of the ‘pansies’ were probably psychiatric patients. The French executed an estimated 1,600 of their own soldiers, the British 300, the Germans 50. Later, a new tactic was invented: jolts of electricity through the brain were used to get ‘cowards’ back on their feet, quickly and radically.
    Amid these cruelties, soldiers and officers did all they could to preserve a few remnants of ‘normal’ existence. ‘I often sat with a feeling of comfortable security at the table in my little bunker,