Alexander Solzehenitsyn on his experence in East Prussa

“I remember myself in my captain’s shoulder straps and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: “so were we any better?” In one poem “Prussian Nights”, he wrote:

The little daughters on the mattress,

Dead. How many have been on it?

A platoon, a company perhaps?

A girl’s been turned into a woman,

A woman turned into a corpse.

Alexander Solzehenitsyn