(1) Stuart Cloete, A Victorian Son (1972)

As you lifted a body by its arms and legs, they detached themselves from the torso, and this was not the worst thing. Each body was covered inches deep with a black fur of flies, which flew up into your face, into your mouth, eyes and nostrils as you approached. The bodies crawled with maggots. The bodies had the consistency of Camembert cheese.

(2) Letter from Roland Leighton to Vera Brittain (August, 1915)

Among this chaos of twisted iron and splintered timber and shapeless earth are the fleshless, blackened bones of simple men who poured out their red, sweet wine of youth unknowing, for nothing more tangible than Honour or their Country's Glory or another's Lust of Power. Let him who thinks that war is a glorious golden thing, who loves to roll forth stirring words of exhortation, invoking Honour and Praise and Valour and Love of Country. Let him look at a little pile of sodden grey rags that cover half a skull and a shine bone and what might have been its ribs, or at this skeleton lying on its side, resting half-crouching as it fell, supported on one arm, perfect but that it is headless, and with the tattered clothing still draped around it; and let him realise how grand and glorious a thing it is to have distilled all Youth and Joy and Life into a foetid heap of hideous putrescence.

(3) George Mallory, letter to his wife, Ruth Mallory (15th August, 1916)

I don't object to corpses so long as they are fresh - I soon found that I could reason thus with them. Between you and me is all the difference between life and death. But this is an accepted fact that men are killed and I have no more to learn about that from you, and the difference is no greater than that because your jaw hangs and your flesh changes colour or blood oozes from your wounds. With the wounded it is
different. It always distresses me to see them.

(4) Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography (1964)

At the beginning of the First World War, popular opinion was that it would not last more than four months, that the science of modern warfare would take such a ghastly toll of human life that mankind would demand cessation of such barbarism. But we were mistaken. We were caught in an avalanche of mad destruction and brutal slaughter that went on for four years to the bewilderment of humanity. We had started a hemorrhage of world proportion, and we could not stop it.

Sir Philip Sassoon had been official secretary to Lloyd George during the war. He had a seat in Parliament representing Brighton and Hove, and asked if I would accompany him to a hospital in Brighton to visit the incurable spastic cases who had been wounded during the war. It was terribly sad to look into those young faces and to see the lost hope there. One man was so paralyzed that he painted with a brush in his mouth, the only part of his body he could use. Another had fists so clenched that he had to be given an anesthetic in order to cut his finger-nails to prevent them from growing into the palms of his hands. Some patients were in such a terrible state that I was not allowed to see them.

(5) A.A. Milne, It's Too Late Now: The Autobiography of a Writer (1939)

Ernest Pusch wore an under-garment of chain mail... such as had been worn in the Middle Ages to guard against unfriendly daggers, and was now sold to over-loving mothers as likely to turn a bayonet-thrust or keep off a stray fragment of shell; as I suppose, it might have done.... Anyway it didn't matter; for on the evening when we first came within reach of the battle-zone, just as he was settling down to his tea, a shell came over and blew him to pieces.

(6) Basil Rathbone, In and Out of Character (1956)

We retired late, full of good food and Scotch whiskey. We shared my bed and were soon sound asleep. It was still dark when I awakened from a nightmare. I had just seen John killed. I lit the candle beside my bed and held it to my brother's face - for some moments I could not persuade myself that he was not indeed dead. At last I heard his regular gentle breathing. I kissed him and blew out the candle and lay back on my pillow again. But further sleep was impossible. A tremulous premonition haunted me - a premonition which even the dawn failed to dispel. (John Rathbone was killed in the trenches a few days later.)