...on the German character....

Frederick Palmer

...the German gunners refused to play for realism by sending us a marmite. Probably they had seen us through the telescope at the start and concluded we weren't worth a shot. In the first months of the war such a target would have received a burst of shells, for the fun of seeing us scatter, if nothing else. Then ammunition was plentiful and the sport of shooting had not lost its zest; but in these winter days orders were not to waste ammunition. The factories must manufacture a supply ahead for the summer campaign. There must be fifteen dollars' worth of target in sight, say, for the smallest shell costs that; and the shorter you are of shells the more valuable the target must be. Besides, firing a cannon had become as commonplace a function to both French and German gunners as getting up to put another stick of wood in the stove or going to open the door to take a letter from the postman.

 We had glimpses of other trenches; but this is not the place in this book to write of trenches. We shall see trenches till we are weary of them later. We are going direct to Gerbeviller, which was-emphasis on the past tense-a typical little Lorraine town of fifteen hundred inhabitants. Look where you would now, as we drove along the road, and you saw churches without steeples, houses with roofs standing on sections of walls, houses smashed into bits. 

" I saw no such widespread destruction as this in Belgium I " I exclaimed.

 " There was no such fighting in Belgium," was the answer. Of course not, except in the southwestern corner, where the armies still face each other.

 " Not all the damage was done by the Germans," the major explained. " Naturally, when they were pouring in death from the cover of a house, our guns let drive at that house," he went on. " The owners of the houses that were hit by our shells are rather proud -proud of our marksmanship, proud that we gave the unwelcome guest a hot pill to swallow." 

For ten days the Bavarians had Gerbeviller. They tore it to pieces before they got it, then burned the remains because they said the population sniped at them. All the orgy of Louvain was repeated here, unchronicled to our people at home. The church looks like a Swiss cheese from shell-holes. Its steeple was bound to be an observation post, reasoned the Germans; so they poured shells into it. But the brewery had a tall chimney which was an even better lookout, and the brewery is the one building unharmed in the town. The Bavarians knew that they would need that for their commissariat. For a Bavarian will not fight without his beer. The land was littered with barrels after they had gone. I saw some in trenches occupied by Bavarian reserves not far back of where their firing-line had been.

From:  Frederick Palmer, My Year of the Great War (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1916), pp. 191-92.