Wow. It's hard to think about those days, really. It seems so senseless, and was.

At least one of my maternal grandmother's brothers died in WWI, fighting for the Germans. Both my mother's parents were German immigrants, coming over prior to WWI. Mom says they stopped speaking German in the house when the war broke out.

However, that grand-uncle, I guess, was wounded and left in No Man's Land. He took 5 days to die, probably from a combination of lack of water and bleeding, and wrote a letter during those days. Apparently the letters get larger and larger, the lines less and less distinct, until it ends.

Mom's side of the family didn't talk about Germany, having been through two World Wars over here by then. I did learn a few German "terms of endearment" from a couple of bachelor uncles, "scheisskopf" and "schweinhundt" among them, but that was it. I didn't hear about the letter until most of the people who knew more about it had died, and I'm not sure where to look to find it.

But you got me thinking. It might be worthwhile to try to track it down.

Arf