Mein Kampf
strengthen the enemy’s confidence to the limit, and hence to prolong and increase the sufferings of their loved ones at the battle front. The silly letters of German women eventually cost hundreds of thousands of men their lives.
Even by 1916 there were various alarming signs. The men at the front cursed and “groused,” were discontented in many respects, and often very justly indignant. While they were starving and suffering, and their families at home were in misery, elsewhere there was abundance and riotous living. Even at the front itself all was not as it should have been in this respect.
Even then, that is, there were faint warnings of crisis—but these were all still internal matters. The same man who growled and cursed would silently do his duty a few minutes later as if it were a matter of course. The same company that was feeling discontented would dig into the section of trenches it had to defend as if Germany’s fate depended upon this hundred yards of mud-holes. It was still the front formed by the old, magnificent army of heroes!
I was to experience the difference between it and home in glaring contrast.
At the end of September, 1916, my division entered the battle of the Somme. For us it was the first of the monstrous battles that now followed, and the impression it created is hardly to be described. It seemed more like Hell than a war.
In the whirlwind tattoo of the guns for weeks at a time the German front held out, sometimes being pushed back, then advancing again, but never giving way.
On October 7, 1916, I was wounded.
I arrived safely at the rear, and was ordered to Germany by transport train.
Two years had passed since I had seen home—an almost endless stretch of time under such circumstances. I could hardly imagine how Germans who were not in uniform would look. When I was in the base hospital at Hermies, I started as if in alarm when the voice of a German woman, a nurse, addressed a man lying next to me. A sound like that for the first time in two years!
190
