‘Psychologically’, wrote a gunner in a heavy artillery battery, ‘I am finding it increasingly hard to manage when you’ve just been having a good chat with a comrade and half an hour later you see him as little more than scraps of flesh as if he had never existed, or comrades who are lying badly wounded in front of you in a large pool of their own blood and beg you with pleading eyes to help them because in most cases they cannot speak any more, or pain takes away their power of speech. That is terrible… This war is a crushing war of nerves.’
