Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Italian Sergeant Mario Rigoni Stern, on the Don River line in southern Russia:

Then, towards midnight, the fireworks came. Suddenly tracers split the sky, machine-gun bullets passed mewing over our strong-point and the 152 mms burst in front of our trenches; immediately afterwards the 75/13mms and Baroni’s 8mm mortars split the air and the fishes in the river. The earth shook and sand and snow fell from the trenches.