““All that Lanz experienced—the burial of comrades as if they were animals, the abandonment of the wounded, the decimation of the once beautiful pageant of men on horseback, the shooting of a defenseless man—began raising questions in his mind. “Were these things improper or immoral?” he asked himself. “Again and again I had to return a negative answer. [I and my] comrades had become,” he concluded, “no longer human beings, but simply blood-thirsty brutes; for otherwise [we] would be very bad soldiers”—and likely dead ones. Once he had accepted this truth, a seed was planted in Lanz’s brain. He had to find a way to no longer face these moral quandaries.””
