But most of all I was upset by myself. I can never really decide for myself what is right and what is wrong about this war. I rejoice at our victories but at the same time the thought of all those dead and wounded makes me beside myself. I heard yesterday that there is a military hospital hidden in the forest for the soldiers who had had their faces shot away. They apparently look so horrific that ordinary people can't even look at them.* Things like that make me despair.
*Such cases existed in all the warring countries, as did the policy of isolation—for the most part, voluntarily—in closed nursing homes. In France, 9,900 men with destroyed faces formed a special veterans assocation after the war.
~From "The Beauty and the Sorrow" by Peter Englund, p 245