My aide-de-camp and I noticed at dusk how clever and dangerous the opponent was. For some time, there had been total silence and we had a short exchange of thoughts as we were standing in a clearing. Suddenly, a shot was fired, and a messenger who had come with us stood for a second as if frozen, then fell to the ground. Upon my rather frightened call, "Fiege, what's the matter?" he answered in clearly understandable words, "I am dead, Herr Major!" Seconds later, that's what he really was. One could move only with the most extreme caution. Comrades carried the dead back as usual, wrapped in his ground-sheet. During the long war I had experienced many things, but that a messenger reporting his own death was one of the more macabre..."