“One must have lived through these hours in order to get an idea of it,” a French chaplain said of life in one of the fortresses blocking approaches to the hill. “It seems as though we are living under a steam hammer…You receive something like a blow in the hollow of the stomach. But what a blow!…Each explosion knocks us to the ground. After a few hours one becomes somewhat dumbfounded.” He wrote of badly wounded men left unattended for eight days, “lying down, dying of hunger, suffering thirst to the extent that they were compelled to drink their urine.”
