Travelling in a truck and a signals van, Hans Albring had far more leisure to write than the infantryman Ernst Guicking. With ambitions to become an artist, he tried to sketch word pictures for his rapidly shifting impressions – the old man at the farm gazing in bitter silence through puckered eyelids, the captured officer by the roadside, looking at the victorious Germans ‘confidently and coldly, quite composed with a terrible, extreme calm’. In Poitiers, the beauty of the frescoes in the ancient Baptistery won him over, and he grieved at the loss of so many stained-glass windows. The plump,
...more
