My ex-wife's grandfather fought on the other side (as part of the Romanian Army), and after he came back from the Eastern Front he tried as best as he could to support and tell the story of his "comrades" (he would always call them with that name, even in his 90s). Of course he, like almost all the soldiers involved in that war, had nothing personal against the soldiers they were fighting against, they were just small pawns in a greater, horrible game. He once told the story of a Russian old couple who had received him in their house as the Romanian Army was retreating from outside Stalingrad, in a -30 degrees winter. Without this couple helping him he wouldn't have made it back to his wife.

Although he came from a traditional, rural background, the horrors he had seen in the war scarred him for life, turning him into an atheist. Even in his old age he was saying that there could be no God that would allow happening the stuff that he had seen.

War is hell.