Max Hastings Two-Book Collection: All Hell Let Loose and Catastrophe. Max Hastings
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were before we went to France.’
Active service, when it came, changed everything. American correspondent E.J. Kahn wrote from New Guinea: ‘As an urban selectee’s military career progresses, he changes gradually from a preponderantly indoor being into a wholly outdoor one.’ Marine Eugene Sledge recoiled from the brutish state to which the battlefield reduced him: ‘The personal bodily filth imposed upon the combat infantryman by living conditions on the battlefield was difficult for me to tolerate. It bothered almost everyone I knew…I stunk! My mouth felt…like I had gremlins walking around in it with muddy boots on…Short as it was, my hair was matted with dust and rifle oil. My scalp itched, and my stubble beard was becoming an increasing source of irritation in the heat. Drinking water was far too precious…to use in brushing one’s teeth or in shaving, even if the opportunity had arisen.’
Combat opened a chasm between those who experienced its horrors, and those at home who did not. In December 1943, Canadian Farley Mowat wrote to his family from the Sangro front in Italy: ‘The damnable truth is we are in really different worlds, on totally different planes, and I don’t really know you any more, I only know the you that was. I wish I could explain the desperate sense of isolation, of not belonging to my own past, of being adrift in some kind of alien space. It is one of the toughest things we have to bear – that and the primal, gut-rotting worm of fear.’
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