“It was pleasant and peaceful there among the trees, around the little grave-like pits that we had dug for shelter from the long-range stuff. All of us were older by a dozen years than we had been a dozen days before.
“Some of the fellows slept away the drowsy June-time afternoon or lay at ease to watch the little summer clouds roll overhead between the branches.
“Some sat about in little groups and swapped experiences or tried to engage our old-timers in talk, hoping they would tell about the first attacks, which we recruits had missed.
“A few came in for lots of kidding because they read their pocket Testaments for hours on end. We called them hypocrites and pitied them. They were so damned sincere.
“We remembered times they hadn’t been, before we reached the front.
“It wasn’t funny.
“We all had Testaments.
“A loving people back in God’s country had issued them to us with many blessings, and then had sent us out to fight the Germans.
“They had not cared to see that we had tools of war. We borrowed most of those.
“Here were men who tried to make their peace with God before they kept a rendezvous with Death.
“The Germans had Gott Mit Uns stamped on their belt buckles.
“Christians are such charming people.”
– Elton E. Mackin in Suddenly We Didn’t Want to Die: Memoirs of a World War I Marine
