Dispatches from Bordeaux stated that letters found on dead and captured German officers prove the truth of reports regarding the terrible mortality in the German ranks, especially among officers.  In the Tenth and Imperial Guard Corps of the German army it is said that only a few high ranking officers escaped being shot, and many have been killed.  The German officers have distinguished themselves by their courage, according to the stories of both British and French who fought them.

An officer of an Imperial Guard regiment, who was taken prisoner after being wounded, said: 

“My regiment left for the front with sixty officers; it counts today only five.  “We underwent terrible trials.”

A German artillery officer wrote: 

“Modern war is the greatest of follies.  Companies of 250 men in the Tenth Army Corps have been reduced to seventy men, and there are companies of the guard commanded by volunteers of a year, all the officers having disappeared.”

SAYS GEBMANS FOUGHT EVERY DAY

The following is from a letter, written during the prolonged battle of the Aisne by a lieutenant of the Twenty-sixth German Artillery: 

“The Tenth Corps has been constantly in action since the opening of the campaign.  Nearly all our horses have fallen.  We fight every day from 5 in the morning till 8 at night, without eating or drinking.  The artillery fire of the French is frightful.  We get so tired that we cannot ride a horse, even at a walk.  Toward noon our battery was literally under a rain of shrapnel shells and that lasted for three days.  We hope for a decisive battle to end the situation, for our troops cannot rest.  A French aviator last night threw four bombs, killing four men and wounding eight, and killing twenty horses and wounding ten more.  We do not receive any more mail, for the postal automobiles of the Tenth Corps have been destroyed.”

HOW IT FEELS TO BE WOUNDED

Many men in the trenches have proved themselves heroes in the war.  A wounded British private told this story: 

“We lay in the trench, my friend and I, and when the order to fire came we shot, and shot till our rifles burned up.  Still the Germans swarmed on toward us, and then my friend received a bad wound.  I turned to my work again, continuing to shoot slowly.  Then I rose a little too high on my shoulder.

“Do you know what it is like to be wounded?  A little sting pierced my arm like a hot wire; too sharp almost to be sore, and my rifle fell from me.  I looked at my friend then and he was dead.”

In one casualty list made public by the British war office in September, sixteen officers were reported killed, thirty-eight wounded and ten missing.  The famous Coldstream Guards and the Black Watch regiments were among the sufferers.

HOW GENEBAL FINDLEY DIED