Moving forward into battle, the soldiers heard the sounds of their impending rendezvous. Booming artillery rounds punctuated the ever-increasing din of rifle and machine-gun fire. The troops marched in formation closer to the front line near Möuhlhausen. A courier arrived from the commanding officer, and the battalion leader shouted out, “Herr Priest, it's serious: do your duty!” The military chaplain, a purple stola over his uniform, stepped to the head of each company. In his diary, he noted that his nerves trembled and his heart beat rapidly as he intoned as loudly and as confidently as he could muster: “Dear comrades! An earnest hour has arrived for you. Reconcile with your Lord God, repent with all your heart all the sins of your life and say: O God, be merciful to me, a poor sinner! Each man must do his duty at his post. I now give you absolution: I absolve you of all of your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.” The orders went out and the regiment went into action, the priest moving forward into a hail of bullets and shrapnel. Regardless of his intent to advance with the troops, he quickly became occupied ministering to the wounded and dying. From the very beginning of the Great War, industrial warfare strained the Catholic Church's resources at the front line.

Near the end of the war, the Church still struggled to understand the conflict and to allocate its resources to the men at the front. In a 1918 position paper entitled “Inner Reform of the Army,” the leader of Austro-Hungarian military chaplaincy reflected, “Modern war had developed the necessity of holding out for days under the heaviest artillery fire … that placed especially high demands on nerves and willpower.” The chaplains’ chief reflected that, “new forms of battle,” especially the “so-called stationary struggle [Stellungskampf]” caused an “inconsolable monotony of battle and work” in the “extremely primitive forms of life.”