[ProtectOurFreedom]

Good review and suggestions. Thanks for taking the time to write that.

I watched it last night and was absolutely blown away by the realism of the trench warfare scenes. It is actually hard to watch.

Perhaps even harder to watch is the insane German high commander who sends his troops into battle against the French with 15 minutes to go until the 11th hour.

My Opa fought on the German side on the Eastern Front but never spoke of it. He passed in 1969 when I was a freshman in college. They lived about five hours by car from us, so we saw them only a couple times a year for holidays. I would have liked to have gotten to know them better. My Opa did write his memoirs about his time as a Russian POW in a small village and his escape, but nothing about his battles.

[C19fan]

There were stories about despite everyone knowing there was a set time for a ceasefire, the artillery kept going and units were still ordered to advance for some bit of territory. From the Christmas Truce of 1914 to murder.

[ansel12]

""I watched it last night and was absolutely blown away by the realism of the trench warfare scenes. It is actually hard to watch.""

In late-night beery discussions when I was trying to make my point about women in the military I would sometimes take this off the wall and pass it around, asking the women if they really thought females belonged in a fight where this was a fundamental weapon, look at all of the killing components to this knife and the upper body strength and level of aggression and viciousness it would take to maximize its use.

[libstripper]

Are his memoirs published and available?

[oldvirginian]

“Perhaps even harder to watch is the insane German high commander who sends his troops into battle against the French with 15 minutes to go until the 11th hour.”

The Germans weren’t the only ones who did that. All along the lines soldiers were being killed right up to the last moment.
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2018/11/08/in-the-final-hours-of-world-war-i-a-terrible-toll/

[Tallguy]

Perhaps even harder to watch is the insane German high commander who sends his troops into battle against the French with 15 minutes to go until the 11th hour.

The US Army pressed an attack the morning of November 11th and lost thousands. The inquiry into that fiasco was squelched.

[rxh4n1]

There is a family story my Mom used to tell that could’ve been right from the book. My mother’s uncle was captured by the French in 1914 and spent5 the rest of the war building railroads in Morocco. He wrote home and told his son (Moms cousin) not to join the army. At the end of the school year in 1915 the teacher gave a rah rah patriotic speech and the whole class enlisted. Cousin was marching to the front on the first day and was killed by a sniper.