[myrmekochoria]

Fotografia: Ruiny Bailleul

Francuzi pod okupacją opowiadają Gibbsowi o zachowaniu żołnierzy niemieckich:

In some few villages there were living people left behind, some hundreds in Nesle and Roye, and, all told, some thousands. They had been driven in from the other villages burning around them, their own villages, whose devastation they wept to see.I met these people who had lived under German rule and talked with many of them—old women, wrinkled like dried-up apples, young women waxen of skin, hollow-eyed, with sharp cheekbones, old peasant farmers and the gamekeepers of French chateaux, and young boys and girls pinched by years of hunger that was not quite starvation. It was from these people that I learned a good deal about the psychology of German soldiers during the battles of the Somme. They told me of the terror of these men at the increasing fury of our gun-fire, of their desertion and revolt to escape the slaughter, and of their rage against the "Great People" who used them for gun-fodder. Habitually many of them talked of the war as the "Great Swindle." These French civilians hated the Germans in the mass with a cold, deadly hatred. They spoke with shrill passion at the thought of German discipline, fines, punishments, requisitions, which they had suffered in these years. The hope of vengeance was like water to parched throats. Yet I noticed that nearly every one of these people had something good to say about some German soldier who had been billeted with them. "He was a good-natured fellow. He chopped wood for me and gave the children his own bread. He wept when he told me that the village was to be destroyed." Even some of the German officers had deplored this destruction. "The world will have a right to call us barbarians," said one of them in Ham. "But what can we do? We are under orders. If we do not obey we shall be shot. It is the cruelty of the High Command. It is the cruelty of war."

Wpis o spalonej ziemi: http://www.wykop.pl/wpis/15504913/fotografia-skutki-rozkazow-ludendorffa-fotografia-/

#cytaty #fotografia #fotohistoria #historiajednejfotografii #historia #iwojnaswiatowa #wielkawojna #myrmekochoria

[tor_Arka]

@myrmekochoria: nie przesadzaj z tą I wojną światową, ona nie była taka straszna ( ͡º ͜ʖ͡º)