The hell of Verdun

[Theobald]

The hell of Verdun

- By Frank H. Simonds, famous American war historian

We left the little Mairie, entered our machines and slid out swiftly for the last miles, climbed and curved over the final hill and suddenly looked down on a deep, trench-like valley marching from east to west and carrying the Paris-Verdun-Metz railroad, no longer available for traffic. And as we coasted down the hill we heard the guns . . . not steadily, but only from time to time, a distant boom, a faint billowing up of musketry fire. Some three or four miles straight ahead there were the lines of fire, beyond the brown hills that flanked the valley.

At the bottom of the valley we turned east, moved on for a mile and stopped abruptly. The guns were sounding more clearly, and suddenly there was a sense not of soldiers, but of an army. On one side of the road a column was coming toward us, a column of men who were leaving the trenches for a rest, the men who for the recent days had held the first line. Wearily but steadily they streamed by; the mud of the trenches covered their tunics; here and there a man had lost his steel helmet and wore a handkerchief about his head, probably to conceal a slight wound that but for the helmet had killed him.

These men were smiling as they marched; they carried their full equipment and it rattled and tinkled; they carried their guns at all angles, they wore their uniforms in the strangest of disorders; they seemed almost like miners coming from the depths of the earth rather than soldiers returning from a decisive battle, from the hell of modern shell fire.

But It was the line on the other side of the road that held the eye. Here were the troops that were going toward the fire, toward the trenches, that were marching to the sound of the guns, and as one saw them the artillery rumble took on a new distinctness.

Involuntarily I searched the faces of these men as they passed. They were hardly ten feet from me. Platoon after platoon, company after company, whole regiments in columns of fours. And seeing the faces brought an instant shock; they all . . . were in the thirties, not the twenties; men still in the prime of strength, of health, but the fathers of families, the men of full manhood.

Almost in a flash the fact came home. This was what all the graves along the road had meant. This was what the battlefields and the glories of the twenty months had spelled-France bad sent her youth and it was spent; she was sending her manhood now.

In the line no man smiled and no man straggled; the ranks were closed up and there were neither commands nor any visible sign of authority. These men who were marching to the sound of the guns had been there before. They knew precisely what it meant. Yet you could not but feel that as they went a little wearily, sadly, they marched willingly. They would not have it otherwise. Their faces were the faces of men who had taken the full measure of their own fate.

(...)

You had a sense of the loathing, the horror, above all the sadness that was in their hearts that this thing, this war, this destruction had to be. They had come here through all the waste of ruined villages and shell-torn hillsides; all the men that you saw would not measure the cost of a single hour of trench fighting if the real attack began. This these men knew, and the message of the artillery fire, which was only one of unknown terrors for you, was intelligible to the utmost to each of them.

And yet with the weariness there was a certain resignation, a certain patience, a certain sense of comprehending sacrifice that more than all else is France to-day, the true France. This, and not the empty forts, not even the busy guns, was the wall that defended France, this line of men. If it broke there would come thundering down again out of the north all the tornado of destruction that had turned Northeastern France into a waste place and wrecked so much of the world's store of the beautiful and the inspiring.

Somehow you felt that this was in the minds of all these men. They had willed to die that France might live. They were going to a death that sounded ever more clearly as they marched. This death had eaten up all that was young, most of what was young at the least, of France; it might yet consume France, and so these men marched to the sound of the guns. . . . Instinctively I thought of what Kipling had said to me in London:

"Somewhere over there," he had said, "the thing will suddenly grip your throat and your heart; it will take hold of you as nothing in your life has ever done or ever will." And I know that I never shall forget those lines of quiet, patient, middle-aged men marching to the sound of the guns, leaving at their backs the countless graves that hold the youth of France, the men who had known the Marne, the Yser, Champagne, who had known death for nearly two years, night and day, almost constantly. Yet during the fifteen minutes I watched there was not one order, not one straggler; there was a sense of the regularity with which the blood flows through the human arteries in this tide, and it was the blood of France.

(...)

So many people have asked me, I had asked myself, the question before I went to France: "Are they not weary of it? Will the French not give up from sheer exhaustion of strength?" I do not think so, now that I have seen the faces of these hundreds of men as they marched to the trenches beyond Verdun. France may bleed to death, but I do not think that while there are men there will be an end of the sacrifice. No pen or voice can express the horror that these men, that all Frenchmen, have of this war, of all war, the weariness. They hate it; you cannot mistake this; but France marches to the frontier in the spirit that men manned the walls against the barbarians in the other days; there is no other way; it must be.

Over and over again there has come the invariable an answer; it would have come from scores and hundreds of these men who passed so near me I could have touched their faded uniforms if I had asked-"It is for France. for civilization; it must be, for there is no other way; we shall die, but with us, with our sacrifice, perhaps this thing will end." You cannot put it in words quite, I do not think even any Frenchman has quite said it, but you can see it, you can feel it, you can understand it, when you see a regiment, a brigade, a division of these men of thirty, some perhaps of forty, going forward to the war they hate and will never quit until that which they love is safe or they and all their race are swallowed up . . . . Under the crumbling gate of the Verdun fortress . . . as we entered a shell burst just behind us and the roar drowned out all else in its sudden and paralyzing crash. It had fallen, so we learned a little later, just where we had been watching the passing troops; it bad fallen among them and killed. But an hour or two later, when we passed the point where it fell, men were still marching by. Other regiments of men were still marching to the sound of the guns, and those who had passed were already over the hills and beyond the river, filing into the trenches in time, so it turned out, to meet the new attack that came with the later afternoon.

I went to Verdun to see the forts, the city, the hills and the topography of a great battle; I went in the hope of describing with a little of clarity what the operation meant as a military affair. . . . But I shall never be able to describe this thing which was the true Verdun for me - these men, their faces, seen as one heard the shell fire as I the musketry rolling, not steadily but intermittently, the men who had marched over the roads that are lined with graves, through villages that are destroyed, who had come of their own will and in calm determination and marched unhurryingly and yet unshrinkingly, the men who were no longer young, who bad left behind them ail that men hold dear in life, home, wives, children, because they knew that there was no other way.

I can only say to all those who have asked me, 'What of France?" this simple thing, that I do not believe the French will ever stop. I do not believe, as the Germans have said, that French courage is. abating. I do not believe the Kaiser himself would think this if he had seen these men's faces as they marched toward his guns. I think he would feel as I felt, as one must feel, that these men went willingly, hating war with their whole soul, destitute of passion or anger. I never beard a passionate word in France, because there had entered into their minds, into the mind and heart of a whole race, the belief that what was at stake was the thing that for two thousand years of history has been France.

[Theobald]

A French point of view :

Memoirs & Diaries: Account of the Assaults Upon Fort Vaux, Verdun, June 1916

- By an anonymous French Lieutenant

We had scarcely arrived at the right of Fort de Vaux, on the slope of the ravine, when there came an unprecedented bombardment of twelve hours.

Alone, in a sort of dugout without walls, I pass twelve hours of agony, believing that it is the end. The soil is torn up, covered with fresh earth by enormous explosions.

In front of us are not less than 1,200 guns of 240, 305, 380, and 420 calibre, which spit ceaselessly and all together, in these days of preparation for attack. These explosions stupefy the brain; you feel as if your entrails were being torn out, your heart twisted and wrenched; the shock seems to dismember your whole body And then the wounded, the corpses!

Never had I seen such horror, such hell. I felt that I would give everything if only this would stop long enough to clear my brain. Twelve hours alone, motionless, exposed, and no chance to risk a leap to another place, so closely did the fragments of shell and rock fall in hail all day long.

At last, with night, this diminished a little. I can go on into the woods! The shells still burst all around us, but their infernal din no longer makes any impression on me - a queer trait of the human temperament.

After that we are lodged in fortified caves where we pass five days in seclusion, piled on top of each other, without being able to lie down.

I bury three comrades in a shell-hole. We are without water, and, with hands that have just touched the poor mangled limbs, we eat as if nothing were wrong.

We are taken back for two days into a tunnel where the lachrymal shells make us weep. Swiftly we put on our masks. The next day, at the moment of taking supper and retiring to rest, we are hastily called into rank; that's it - we are going to the motion-picture show.

We pass through an infernal barrage fire that cracks red all around in the dark. We run with all speed, in spite of our knapsacks, into the smother of broken branches that used to be a forest. Scarcely have we left a hole or a ditch when shells as big as a frying pan fall on the spot.

We are laid flat by one that bursts a few yards away. So many of them fall at one time that we no longer pay any attention to them. We tumble into a ravine which we have named Death Ravine. That race over shell-swept, open country, without trenches, we shall long remember.

At last we enter the village - without suspecting that the Germans are there! The commanding officer scatters us along the steep hill to the left and says : "Dig holes, quickly; the Boches are forty yards away!"

We laugh and do not believe him; immediately, cries, rifle shots in the village; our men are freeing our Colonel and Captain, who were already prisoners. Impossible! Then there are no more Frenchmen there? In two minutes the village is surrounded, while the German batteries get a rude jolt.

It was time! All night long you hear tools digging from one end to the other; trenches are being made in haste, but secretly. After that there is a wall, and the Germans will advance no further.

The next morning a formidable rumour - the Boches are coming up to assault Fort de Vaux. The newspapers have told the facts; our 75's firing for six hours, the German bodies piling up in heaps. Horrible! but we applauded. Everybody went out of the trenches to look. The Yser, said the veterans, was nothing beside this massacre.

That time I saw Germans fleeing like madmen. The next day, the same thing over again; they have the cynicism to mount a battery on the slope; the German chiefs must be hangmen to hurl their troops to death that way in masses and in broad daylight.

All afternoon, a maximum bombardment; a wood is razed, a hill ravaged with shell-holes.

It is maddening; continuous salvos of "big chariots"; one sees the 380's and 420's falling; a continuous cloud of smoke everywhere. Trees leap into air like wisps of straw; it is an unheard-of spectacle. It is enough to make you lose your head, yet we patiently wait for the outcome.

The barrage fire cuts our communication with the rear, literally barring off the isthmus of Death Ravine. If the attacks on our wings succeed, our two regiments are prisoners, hemmed in, but the veterans (fathers of families) declare that we shall not be taken alive, that we will all fight till we die. It is sublime.

"Keep up your courage, coolness, and morale, boys, and we will drive them back in good time."

It is magnificent to see that our last recourse is a matter of sheer will; despite this monstrous machinery of modern war, a little moral effort, a will twenty years old that refuses to weaken, suffices to frustrate the offensive!

The rifles do not shoot enough, but we have machine guns, the bayonet, and we have vowed that they shall not pass. Twenty times the alarm is given; along the hillside one sees the hands gripping the rifles; the eyes are a little wild, but show an energy that refuses to give way.

Suddenly it is already night. A sentinel runs up to the outposts: "There they are! Shoot!"

A whole section shoots. But are the outposts driven in? Nobody knows. I take my rifle to go and see. I do not catch a ball. I find the sentinels flat on their faces in their holes, and run to the rear gesticulating and crying out orders to cease firing.

The men obey. I return to the front, and soon, a hundred yards away, I see a bush scintillate with a rapid line of fire. This time it is they. Ta-ca-ta-ca, bzzibzzi.

I hold my fire until they approach, but the welcome evidently does not please them, for they tumble back over the ridge, leaving some men behind. One wounded cries, "Frantchmen!"

I am drunk, mad. Something moves in the bushes to the right; I bound forward with set bayonet. It is my brave sergeant, who has been out to see whether the Boches have all run away.

These are truly the most interesting moments of war; no longer the waiting, the anguish of bombardment, but the thrill of a free march into a glorious unknown - oh, that intoxication! I sing the "Marseillaise," the boys jubilate, all the successive attacks have failed. After this evening the offensive is going to slacken for several days.

The next day we are relieved at last. Another race with death, this time with broad daylight shining upon the horrible chaos, the innumerable dead, and a few wounded here and there.

Oh! those mangled bodies, still unburied, abandoned for the moment. The danger excites us. A shell falls squarely among us, jarring us and bathing us in flame. My knapsack gets a sliver of shell; I am not touched; it is a miracle.

In the evening we arrive at the river ford, and have another race. The next day, at Verdun, the Germans are still shelling us at the moment when we mount the auto trucks.

In the course of all these actions our losses certainly have been high, but they are nothing compared with the frightful and unimaginable hecatomb of Germans I have witnessed.

[Theobald]

Witnesses of Verdun

- A French captain reports: ...I have returned from the most terrible ordeal I have ever witnessed. […] Four days and four nights – ninety-six hours – the last two days in ice-cold mud – kept under relentless fire, without any protection whatsoever except for the narrow trench, which even seemed to be too wide. […] I arrived with 175 men, I returned with 34 of whom several had half turned insane....

- A French Lieutenant reports: ...Firstly, companies of skeletons passed, sometimes commanded by a wounded officer, leaning on a stick. All marched, or rather: moved forwards with tiny steps, zigzagging as if drugged. […] It seemed as if these speechless faces cried over something appalling: the unbelievable horrors of their martyrdom....

- The last note from the diary of Alfred Joubaire, a French soldier: ...They must be crazy to do what they are doing now: what a bloodbath, what horrid images, what a slaughter. I just cannot find the words to express my feelings. Hell cannot be this dreadful. People are insane!...

- A German soldier writes to his parents: ...An awful word, Verdun. Numerous people, still young and filled with hope, had to lay down their lives here – their mortal remains decomposing somewhere, in between trenches, in mass graves, at cemeteries....

- Louis Barthas recounts the bitter man-to-man fights: ...Woe betide anyone who fell into the hands of the enemy alive; all sense of humanity had disappeared. Soldiers, wounded, stretcher-bearers – a distinction was no longer made....

- An eye-witness: ...One soldier was going insane with thirst and drank from a pond covered with a greenish layer near Le Mort-Homme. A corpse was afloat in it; his black countenance face down in the water and his abdomen swollen as if he had been filling himself up with water for days now....

- A soldier tells: ...The soldiers put their feet in front of them and pulled up out of the swampy and smelly soil. A disgusting impenetrable stench surrounded every move. Some did not manage to pull their boots from the mud and had to continue in their socks, puttee or even barefooted....

- A French soldier describes the horrors of a bombardment: ...When you hear the whistling in the distance your entire body preventively crunches together to prepare for the enormous explosions. Every new explosion is a new attack, a new fatigue, a new affliction. Even nerves of the hardest of steel, are not capable of dealing with this kind of pressure. The moment comes when the blood rushes to your head, the fever burns inside your body and the nerves, numbed with tiredness, are not capable of reacting to anything anymore. It is as if you are tied to a pole and threatened by a man with a hammer. First the hammer is swung backwards in order to hit hard, then it is swung forwards, only missing your scull by an inch, into the splintering pole. In the end you just surrender. Even the strength to guard yourself from splinters now fails you. There is even hardly enough strength left to pray to God....

- A witness tells: ...We all carried the smell of dead bodies with us. The bread we ate, the stagnant water we drank… Everything we touched smelled of decomposition due to the fact that the earth surrounding us was packed with dead bodies....

- Henri Barbusse describes the trenches as:
...a network of elongated pits in which the nightly excreta are piling up. The bottom is covered with a swampy layer from which the feet have to extricate themselves with every step. It smells dreadfully of urine all over....

- A French stretcher-bearer describes the consequences of a flame-thrower attack: ...Some grenadiers returned with ghastly wounds: hair and eyebrows singed, almost not human anymore, black creatures with bewildered eyes....

- Louis Barthas also describes such an attack:
...At my feet two unlucky creatures rolled the floor in misery. Their clothes and hands, their entire bodies were on fire. They were living torches. [The next day] In front of us on the floor the two I had witnessed ablaze, lay rattling. They were so unrecognisably mutilated that we could not decide on their identities. Their skin was black entirely. One of them died that same night. In a fit of insanity the other hummed a tune from his childhood, talked to his wife and his mother and spoke of his village. Tears were in our eyes....

- A soldier tells: ...Seven days without sleep, seven days of fatigue, thirst and fear made these healthy men, these beautifully disciplined companies into a gang of loiterers. Critically ill, but calm and satisfied, because they were now out of danger and appeared to be still alive....

- A German officer recalls: ...We saw a handful of soldiers, commanded by a Captain, slowly approaching, one at the time. The Captain asked which company we were and then started to cry all of a sudden. Did he suffer of shellshock? Then he said: ...when I saw you approach it reminded me of six days ago, when I walked this same road with approximately hundred men. And now look how few there are left.... We watched as we passed them; they where about twenty. They walked by us as living, plastered statues. Their faces stared at us like shrunken mummies, and their eyes were so immense that you could not see anything but their eyes....

- A German soldier describes: ...The men who have lived in these trenches just as long as our infantry men, without going insane under these infernal attacks, must have lost their sense for a large number of things. Our poor men have seen too many atrocities, have witnessed too many incredible matters. I cannot believe that we will be able to cope with this. Our poor little mind simply cannot comprehend all of this....

- An eye-witness: ...There is nothing as tiring as the continuous, enormous bombardment as we have lived through, last night, at the front. The night is disturbed by light as clear as if it were day. The earth moves and shakes like jelly. And the men who are still at the frontline, cannot hear anything but the drumfire, the moaning of wounded friends, the screams of hurt horses, the wild pounding of their own hearts, hour after hour, day after day, night after night....

- A German soldier: ...the soldiers fell over like tin soldiers. Almost all our officers get hurt or killed and many of our men get killed because of their own artillery fire, which is too close and therefore causes many victims...

- A French soldier: ...my battalion comes straight from the land behind the front-lines, the men are exhausted and did not sleep. The battalion consists of 800 men - the battalion that we are here to replace lost 800 men...

- A German eye-witness: ...The losses are registered as follows: they are dead, wounded, missing, nervous wrecks, ill and exhausted. Nearly all suffer from dysentery. Because of the failing provisioning the men are forced to use up their emergency rations of salty meats. They quenched their thirst with water from the shellholes. They are stationed in the village of Ville where every form of care seems to be missing. They have to build their own accommodation and are given a little cacao to stop the diarrhoea. The latrines, wooden beams hanging over open holes, are occupied day and night – the holes are filled with slime and blood...

- A neutral contemporary feels: …that they, within the framework of this World War, are involved in some affair, that will still be considered horrible and appalling in a hundred years time. It is this Hell of Verdun. Since a hundred days – day and night – the sons of two European people fight stubbornly and bitterly over every inch of land. It is the most appalling mass murder of our history…

- A soldier: …One of the trenches is so filled with wounded and dead bodies the attackers have to use the parapet in order to be able to move forward…

- A German witness: ….the latrines cause major problems. They are completely blocked up and smell terribly. This stench is fought with chlorinated lime and this smell mixes with the battlefield smell of decomposition. Men even wear their gas masks when using the latrines…

- A French eye-witness: …mud, heat, thirst, filth, rats, the sweat smell of corpses, the disgusting smell of excreta and the terrible fear: ‘it seems we will have to attack’, and that when nobody has any strength left...

- A German soldier: …and during the summer months the swarms of flies around the corpses and the stench, that horrible stench. If we had to construct trenches we put garlic cloves in our nostrils…

- An eye-witness: … you could never get rid of the horrible stench. If we were on leave and we were having a drink somewhere, it would only last a few minutes before the people at the table beside us would stand up and leave. It was impossible to endure the horrible stench of Verdun...

- A German officer: …the number of defectors increases, the front soldiers become numb by seeing the bodies without heads, without legs, shot through the belly, with blown away foreheads, with holes in their chests, hardly recognisable flab’s, pale and dirty in the thick yellow brown mud, which covers the battle field…

- A French soldier: …everyone who searches for cover in a shell hole, stumbles across slippery, decomposing bodies and has to proceed with smelly hands and smelly clothes…

- A German soldier: …in the drumfire bravery no longer exists: only nerves, nerves, nerves. When anyone is exposed unto such trials and tribulations he is no longer of any use as an attacker or defender…

[Theobald]

Another article about Verdun : Eric Margolis &#151 FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT

@ German members : Unfortunately I didn't find articles dealing with Verdun written by German soldiers or witnesses. Do you know of some ? Please, post them so as to keep the thread "unbiased".

[Carnyx]

I believe my great grand fathers, except but one, were in Verdun. I can understand the anti-military feelings that many survivors came back with after the war.

[Nerthus]

Below is what I could find in English, the last one is in German however:



Erich von Falkenhayn\'s justification for the Verdun offensive

Crown Prince Wilhelm\'s summary

Wilhelm\'s summary of its abandonment

Hindenburg\'s decision to call off the offensive

Erich Ludendorff\'s dismissive view of the battle

A semi-official German historian\'s account of the end of the battle

The story of a German soldier who fought during the first World War at Verdun

[Theobald]

Originally Posted by Carnyx

I believe my great grand fathers, except but one, were in Verdun. I can understand the anti-military feelings that many survivors came back with after the war.

Two of my great-great-grandfathers died in Verdun, and I also think three of my great-grandfathers fought there (the other one was too young). I think virtually every modern French has at least one ancestror who was in that hell, as three quarters of the French army went through "the wringer of Verdun" (Pétain insisted that troops be regularly rotated in the face of such horror).
Verdun is the symbol of both courage, abnegation, resistance (first post) and the horror of a fratricide war (third post) to me. If some of them were still alive, I would like to meet a veteran of Verdun, I can't possibly imagine how it was fighting there...

[Kernunnos]

I see that cretin startegist were not only an italian prerogative. But ours often had innocent soldiers executed along with mutinees, and often mutiny was perfectly moral since orders were senseless: frontline officers often dared to confront superiors who pretended that they be using their soldiers as \"carne da macello\" (flesh for the butcher). Some officers defended their soldiers, some others were merciless. A granduncle of mine could never get rid of remorse for bein part of a discipline platoon: he had been forced to execute too many innocents of any cowardice that he was broken. My grandfather slept in an hospital beside a man devoured by lice. My grand-grandfather was buried alive by a shell and resurfaced by chance, since the soil was easy to move. All the veterans I have heard of would suffer of PTSD, recurrent nightmares during wich they would relive bayonet attacks. My grandfather refused his veteran medal. There was such a class attitude towards common soldiers in the italian army that this officers attitude nourished many more postwar socialists and communists than an entire hatch of marxist professors. Soldiers in austrian captivity were refused food packages from home by the army high command, in order to discourage surrenderings: as a result 25% of the captives died of malnutrition, while french and other nations\' prisoners had normal mortality rates. Especially southern italian officers were used to treat soldiers like half - slaves. It was not a situation to be generalized, however, there were idealistic and brave officers, I have known personally some bright decorated veteran officer. Such officers were the first to denounce bureaucracy, corruption and inefficiency of the military chaste.. ok in the earlys eventies when as a young man I was bright enough to interview them. As I said, many officers behaved well and risked their lives with bravery. But bureaucracy and a chaste system hampered the italian army: a factor noticed also by Rommel in WW2: he came to the conclusion that soldiers were betetr than expected, the bad results of the italian army being due to a bloated, corrupted and bureaucracy ridden officer corp.

[Errigal]

I read recently that doctor's have found evidence of severe physical damage done to the brains of people who were near explosions but survived without serious external injury. The nearby bomb blasts left people with neurological disorders similar to boxers who have had their brain hit against the inside of their skulls repeatedly from punches. It had a strong effect on the patient's personality, making them quick to anger and finding too much noise intolerable. I would not be surprised if hundreds of thousands of veterans of the trenches suffered fom such brain injuries from the repeated nearby explosions.

[Kernunnos]

Originally Posted by Errigal

I read recently that doctor's have found evidence of severe physical damage done to the brains of people who were near explosions but survived without serious external injury. The nearby bomb blasts left people with neurological disorders similar to boxers who have had their brain hit against the inside of their skulls repeatedly from punches. It had a strong effect on the patient's personality, making them quick to anger and finding too much noise intolerable. I would not be surprised if hundreds of thousands of veterans of the trenches suffered fom such brain injuries from the repeated nearby explosions.

My garndfather wasn't under severe combat conditions, while my grand grandfather was, so it was for many granduncles and their friends.

Now, they were fine people, the only reported disease was a sudden awakening in the middle of the night, most often screaming and sweating: "all assalto" or "kill him, kill him", they were reviving bayonet attacks, it seems, possibly the worst ones.

But in their social life they were just as normal as before, even if many of such veterans ever refused to talk of their war experience while being normally warm and talkative.

Actually some infos I have were from my father's perusing pocket diaries, written often in an uncertain italianized venetian.

My grand-grandfather, the one buried and rescued by an hair, spent a normal life as a respected professional, in his last days he was meditating and praying like a monk while being a respected family chief.

He rarely had anger fit and his strong catholic morale kept him from being rude.

Only my grandfather could easily fall prey of rage, but he had had a very sad youth well before going into war, where he almost immediately managed to be transferred into a second line unit : he never saw extensively the action his brothers would see an dsufefr for much time.

My other grandfather's brother died on the Carso plains, one of the worst fighting situation, pretty similar to Verdun in its worst moments.