The impossible language of death

Life on the western front was saturated with violence, and the sight of corpses was an everyday reality. The poilus lived in constant fear of death, but found the subject difficult to write about, or even to name except in predictable terms. They called it a barbarity, a massacre, a hecatomb, a hell. It was carnage, butchery or a combination of both, ‘une vraie carnagerie’, as one soldier put it. Another soldier of the 252nd Infantry regiment struggled hard to find words to express his experience:

The horror of continual bombardment, the presence of death and grotesque mutilation was impossible to express, and soldiers gave up trying. Louis Chirossel, a marble worker from Loriol who fought on Hill 263 in the Argonne, wrote to his wife of the impossibility of finding words to describe the violence: ‘There are some things, dear Eugénie, that, once witnessed, it would be impossible for even the best writer to describe.’ Chirossel witnessed a bombardment which he compared to a scene from a movie; ‘It would have made a wonderful film!’, he wrote, using the metaphor of cinema to distance himself emotionally from the actual destruction.