In The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916, Alistair Horne writes day to day stories of soldiers discussing his or her feelings at that point. He describes the soldiers' terrible conditions and incorporates part of his or her letters describing what they saw. "The compressed area of the battlefield became an open cemetery in which every square foot contained some decomposed piece of flesh: You found the dead embedded in the walls of the trenches, heads, legs, and half-bodies, just as they had been shoveled out of the way by the picks and shovels of the working party." This source provides the most detail because it is like a movie script, in that it shows the life of a soldier in World War 1 talking with other soldiers and expressing his or her feelings about the war. It focuses on one battle, the Battle of Verdun, instead of the entire war.
In many of the letters, the soldiers wrote about his or her own experiences throughout the war. As a source, the letters are both useful and not. The good thing about the letters is that they show how the soldiers felt about the war and how they were able to deal with the constant fighting and the conditions they were in. "It goes on from day to day: alternately awful marches and then a whole day's inactive vegetating; heat and cold; too much to eat and then a long spell of hunger." The downside is that