D
Deleted member 26
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Jesus Christ, that’s horrific.There was a captain in either the 8th or 9th Devons who was a maths teacher in peace time. In the hours before zero hour he observed that the preliminary British bombardment of the German lines had failed to knock out a particular enemy machine gun post near the Devons’ objective that morning.
He used trigonometry to calculate that the angle of the machine gun and the arc it would be firing could only lead to the death of him and all of his men.
He took his calculations back to the command post but was told “sorry, you still have to attack”.
At 07:30 despite knowing what they were walking into they went over the top. They were all killed.
At the end of the day their bodies were brought back to the trench they had attacked from that morning and they were buried in it. A sign was placed nearby: “The Devonshires held this trench, they hold it still”.
Stories like that are what get me.