“I have seen some exceedingly strange things,” wrote Fernand Leger, French stretcher-bearer, from the Western Front. “Heads almost mummified emerging from the mud. … This war is the perfect orchestration of every means of killing, both old and new.” The “new means of killing” in World War I included automatic machine guns, airplanes, U-boats, and poison gas. Some of the “old means” were holdovers from a more innocent era; Oskar Kokoschka (Austrian cavalry officer) rode to battle in a glamorous crested helmet, and later suffered a bayonet wound to the lung.

Otto Dix (German machine-gunner) and Max Beckmann (German army medic) survived the war psychically changed, and each recorded his wartime experiences in a series of prints. Dix’s “War” and Beckmann’s “Hell” are currently appearing together in their entireties for the first time in a powerful exhibition at the Neue Galerie.

During four years of combat, Dix was wounded several times, once almost dying from a shrapnel injury to the neck. Although he had eagerly volunteered, he turned to bitterly antiwar images in the following years. “War,” published in 1924 as a collection of 50 etchings, presents scenes of battlefield carnage in no particular narrative order, along with a few images of seedy brothels. Together they have the impact of a conscientious, almost obsessive daily journal.

Hung closely in several rows, the installation requires kneeling to view the lowest prints, and as for the highest – well, you won’t get a close look at those. But an overall glance will take in some oddly beautiful moments: craters by night, their craggy surfaces almost lovingly illuminated by a flare, a few lonely flowers sprouting incongruously from a patch of ravaged earth.

These are only tiny islands of hope, however, in a torrent of death and decomposing. The velvety, Goya-like darks and resonant lights in the aquatint “Evening on the Wijtschaete Plain” turn out, on closer inspection, to be a layer of strewn corpses. The tight lipped title of “Seen on the Escarpment at Clery-sur-Somme,” underlines Dix’s matter-of-fact recording of the gory details – two shattered bodies propped in a trench. “Disintegrating Trench” piles forms one on top of the other with a kind of nightmarish majesty, evoking something of a postindustrial Durer.

Nearly a half-century later, Dix claimed that he had enlisted out of simple curiosity (“I had to experience how someone beside me suddenly falls over and is dead and the bullet has hit him squarely”). Indeed, the “magic realist” works he produced after the war exhibit an appetite for shocking detail, combined with an Old Masterly finish. Three Dix paintings from the 1920s hang on a wall adjacent to his prints, and of these, a portrait of a Mr. Wolfensberger is especially disturbing.

Max Beckmann also volunteered at the outbreak of the war, and served as a medic in eastern Prussia, Flanders, and Strasbourg. A year later, he was dis charged after suffering a mental breakdown. When he returned to painting in 1917, his work showed a new interest in mythology and social criticism.

The struggles between internal factions in war-torn Germany were the direct inspiration for “Hell,” his portfolio of 10 large-format lithographs published in 1919. While Beckmann’s prints lack the tonal richness and atmospheric depth of Dix’s etchings, their larger size and the softer touch of his litho crayon permitted a more spontaneous attack. His more expansive gestures and compressed, Cubistic spaces add to their pictorial urgency.

Beckmann’s Expressionist tendencies show in his preference for the theatrical over the literal. “The Way Home” depicts the artist on a busy street, questioning a veteran with grievous war injuries to his face and limbs, while two men limp on crutches in the background. An image of the crucifixion/torture of socialist leader Rosa Luxemburg turns “The Martyrdom” into an angry indictment of right-wing extremism. “The Ideologists,” with its assortment of pontificating and raptly attentive characters, satirizes leftist groups. The artist is an equal-opportunity polemicist, taking on the desperation and delusion in every corner; in “The Last Ones,” a figure identified by the museum’s literature as Beckmann himself unleashes a machine-gun barrage against unseen urban foes.

The Beckmann prints are also accompanied by three paintings, and in these his color gives full force to his broad drawing. In “Self-Portrait in Front of a Red Curtain” (1923), the livid skin tones and inky darks of a tuxedo combine to add momentum to his own vertical pose and if there’s a certain smugness to his stern features, it’s made poignant by the generosity of rhythm and dense colors that lend his figure a monumental presence. By comparison, Dix’s paintings feel like collections of glimmering parts. In their prints, however, the two artists’ intensities neatly complement one another, Dix’s scrupulousness setting off Beckmann’s grandiloquence. Facing each other across a single room, “War” and “Hell” turn the gallery into a place of pain and despair – but there’s triumph, too, in the gritty eloquence of these two survivors.

Until September 26 (1048 Fifth Avenue, at 86th Street, 212-628-6200).