I read a firsthand account of an American citizen who traveled to Britain to join (technically illegal but nobody was going to say anything) before the US was formally involved. He said that the most awful thing, besides artillery shelling, were the sturmtruppen. The Germans would gas the British lines and that was the signal. German troops would go over the top (probably where that turn of phrase comes from) and charge with bayonetes fixed while wearing their gasmasks and stalhelms. He recalled one time when his mask and ear were clipped by a bullet and he passed out before the Germans made it to his trench. The charge was largely unsuccessful and when he came to, it was night and he spent the hours listening to the dying Germans caught on the barbed wire and out in the mud.

The Great War was one of the most horrible and terrible conflicts in human history. There were over 700,000 casualties at Verdun alone. At the Somme nearly 20,000 British soldiers died in ONE DAY. By the time the Americans were involved the war was winding down, but our forces took one of the worst jobs; pushing the Germans in the Meuse-Argonne offensive. The Germans had perfected defensive withdrawal and turned the Argonne into a maze of bunkers, foxholes, earthen defenses, and machine gun traps which they turned into a meatgrinder that doughboys went into, wounded came out of, and dead and missing stayed inside of. All told it became one of the worst military engagements the US has been involved in, with over 95,000 Americans wounded and 26,000 Americans killed. For this and many other reasons, Veterans Day, or Armistice Day as I call it interchangeably, is one of my most important holidays.