“Three years. France, mostly. It’s almost impossible to describe the horror… It’s a living… waking… nightmare… There was a soldier, a German; him and his men tried to attack our position in the Argonne forest. It was nighttime. While he was trying to climb through some barbwire, I shot him twice; once in the stomach, once in the neck. He slumped over the barbwire, and no matter what he did to try and wriggle free, it just got worse for him. I left him there, like that, for days, listening to him moaning, crying, “mutti, mutti, mutti”; that’s German for “mama”; “mama”, that’s what he kept saying. The curious thing is that despite the fact that his situation was utterly hopeless, he didn’t wanna die. I offered to kill him several times, but he just kept fighting. Like some miracle would befall him, get him out of his predicament. We hold on so desperately to life; some people feel, certainly in that soldiers situation, that being alive is much, much worse…” (Jimmy)
That quote goes on for ever, but boy, the way Michael Pitt delivered those lines sent shivers down my spine. What a terrific actor.
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