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1 " Three times Jan had been called to the colours (the army), but each time had been deferred because of his deplorable physical condition..when every male who could stand halfway erect was being shipped to Verdun to undergo a radical change in posture from the vertical to the eternal horizontal "
― Günter Grass , The Tin Drum
2 " No wonder the summer solstice had been such a fun day in northern Europe before Christian missionaries arrived from the sunny south. If priests had not driven sex underground, what would the north have been like? Would art have flourished in the absence of sexual repression? What about artillery and fortification? The Reformation? The Thirty Years War? The French Revolution? The final perfection of murder as blood sport at Verdun and Dresden and in the Gulag?In short, where would we be without Jesus? "
3 " The macabre who lived through the war have a story they loved to tell about the soldiers of the Foreign Legion giving a ball in the expanses around Verdun and dancing with the corpses. Alabama's continued brewing of the poisoned filter for a semiconscious banquet table, her insistence on the magic and glamor of life when she was already feeling its pulse like the throbbing of an amputated leg, had something of the same sinister quality. "
― Zelda Fitzgerald , Save Me the Waltz
