All things come to me in black and white like virtue and crime. Yes, black and white are the two elements which concern me. It is my fortune, or misf… - Max Beckmann

The trenches wound in meandering lines and white faces peered from dark dugouts – a lot of men were still preparing the positions, and everywhere among them there were graves. Where they sat, beside their dugouts, even between the sandbags, crosses stuck out. Corpses jammed in among them. It sounds like fiction – one man was frying potatoes on a grave next to his dugout. The existence of life here had already become a paradoxical joke.

To me the most important thing [in a picture] is roundness captured in height and breadth. Roundness in the plane, depth in the feeling of the plane.

Yesterday we came across a cemetery that had been completely destroyed by shellfire. The graves had been blown up, and the coffins lay about in the most uncomfortable positions. The shells had unceremoniously exposed their distinguished occupants to the light of day, and bones, hair, and bits of clothing could be seen through cracks in the burst-open coffins.