The young high-school graduate Hans Albring began the campaign in the west with a yearning to see the great French cathedrals. Girding himself morally like Christ before ‘this terrible Passion, which our soldiers but especially the French are suffering’, with the help of a dictionary he read Racine and Paul Claudel in his trench. A fervent Catholic from the Münsterland, Hans confided to his closest friend, Eugen Altrogge, that there were so few military chaplains that he feared being ‘without any opportunity for confession and communion’. He wondered too why the French hated the Germans so
