908 Ch. 22 • The Great War

British soldiers wearing gas masks Bring a machine gun during

the Battle of the Somme, 1916.

On the eastern front, General Paul von Hindenburg claimed that there

was no way of gauging the number of Russians killed with any accuracy:

“All we do know is that, at times, fighting the Russians, we had to remove

the piles of enemy bodies from before our trenches, so as to get a clear field

of fire against new waves of assault.” In June 1916, the Russian offensive

pushed back the Austrians by combining smaller surprise attacks by specially

trained troops, without the preliminary barrages, against carefully chosen

targets. But the arrival of more German troops minimized Russian gains.

Each side lost more than 1 million men in these encounters.

In 1916, the British poet Isaac Rosenberg, who would later be killed in the

war, wrote “Break of Day in the Trenches,” one of the most haunting poems

to come out of the war.

The darkness crumbles aw'ay.

It is the same old druid Time as ever,

Only a live thing leaps my hand,

A queer sardonic rat,

As I pull the parapet’s poppy

To stick behind my ear.

Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew

Your cosmopolitan sympathies.

Now you have touched this English hand

You will do the same to a German

Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure