Part 32

A girl who, with others, was attending to the enemy wounded, writes: "Doubtless we should have more consolation among our little soldiers, since here we are forbidden to give little kindnesses and attention; but I believe that before the end we shall disobey the order, because we put our hearts into our devotion and our pity." (La Guerre vue d'une Ambulance, p. 116.) It is a little startling to learn of orders against kindness to enemy wounded. In a country one of whose chief newspapers advocated slaughter of the enemy like swine, such orders seem unwise. They can surely scarcely be made except when we wilfully blind ourselves and imagine that our enemies do not share our humanity.

OUR COMMON HUMANITY.

Here is a letter found on one of the German dead, a man with "a good face, strong and kindly," so wrote the Daily Mail correspondent. "My dearest Heart," runs the letter, "when the little ones have said their prayers and prayed for their dear father, and have gone to bed, I sit and think of thee, my love. I think of all the old days when we were betrothed, and I think of all our happy married life. Oh! Ludwig, beloved of my soul, why should people fight each other? I cannot think that God would wish it...."

Here in this leafy place Quiet he lies; Cold, with his sightless face Turned to the skies; 'Tis but another dead: All you can say is said.

Carry the body hence; Kings must have slaves; Kings rise to eminence Over men's graves; So this man's eyes are dim. Cast the earth over him.

What was that white you touched, There by his side? Paper his hand had clutched Tight ere he died? Message or wish, maybe? Smooth out its folds and see.

* * *

Ah! That beside the dead Slumbered the pain! Ah! That the hearts that bled Slept with the slain! That the grief died. But no! Death will not have it so.

These words of Austin Dobson were written of a French sergeant in an earlier war, yet they serve equally well for the German soldier in this. Strange that we leave it to the dead to prove their brotherhood and ours.

Philip Gibbs tells us how in a German dug-out he picked up some letters. "They were all written to 'dear brother Wilhelm,' from sisters and brothers, sending him their loving greetings, praying that his health might be good, promising to send him gifts of food and yearning for his home-coming." They were anxious, for here had been no news for some time. "Every time the postman comes we hope for a little note from you." Can any generous heart think of that anxious waiting unmoved? Shall we children of one Life wait till we have wholly darkened each other's homes, and then call our handiwork peace?

But by that time, by the judgment of God, our eyes will be opened.

We who are bound by the same grief for ever, When all our sons are dead may talk together, Each asking pardon of the other one, For her dead son.

It is we at home who seem to yield only to this dread proof. With the fighters it is often different, as we have seen, and though the stories savour of repetition, the repetition is surely worth while. I have aimed here at no literary production, but simply at a collection of facts that may reach the heart. "We sing," said a soldier from Baden, "to the accompaniment of the piano--especially during the interval for dinner. We have indeed entered into a tacit agreement with the French to stop all fire between 12 and 1 o'clock, so that they and we might not be disturbed when we feed." (Zeitung am Mittag, as quoted in the Daily Chronicle, November 10, 1914.) "One of our teachers, a lieutenant in the R.F.A., who has been out most of the time, had a few days' leave some weeks ago. He said to the school, assembled to do him honour, 'Boys, do not believe the stories you read about the Germans in the newspapers. Whatever they may have done at the beginning of the war, the German is a brave and noble soldier, and after the war we must be friends.'" (From a private letter.) A soldier writes that a diary he kept was blown to bits by a shell. He gave what remained of it to a wounded German who pleaded for it. He had met many German Socialists in the fighting. "It is a blessing to meet such men and amid all the slaughter brought about by our present system, it seems heaven upon earth." (Labour Leader, June 24, 1915.)

ARE WE ALWAYS CHIVALROUS?

It will only be making the amende honorable if we do our best now to spread reports of good deeds of the enemy, for in the early stages of the war we deliberately deleted them from messages, and we have certainly done a great deal to conceal them ever since. Writing to the Times in October, 1914, Mr. Herbert Corey, the American correspondent, said: "The Times leader quotes the Post as charging that I 'flatly made the charge that dispatches had been altered for the purpose of hiding the truth and blackening the German character.' I do not recollect this phrase. I did charge that dispatches of German atrocities were permitted to go through unaltered, and that sentences in other dispatches in which credit was given the Germans for courtesy and kindness were deleted. I abide by that statement."

There have been many angry references to unfair German attempts to influence neutral opinion. A letter such as Mr. Corey's makes me able to understand why some neutrals have accused England of the very same unfairness. There is other testimony to the same effect. Mr. Edward Price Bell, London Correspondent of the Chicago Daily News, has, in a pamphlet published by Fisher Unwin, indicted the British censorship in the following terms:

I call the censorship chaotic because of the chaos in its administration. I call it political because it has changed or suppressed political cables. I call it discriminatory because there are flagrant instances of its not holding the scales evenly between correspondents and newspapers. I call it unchivalrous because it has been known to elide eulogies of enemy decency and enemy valour. I call it destructive because its function is to destroy; it has no constructive function whatever. I call it in effect anti-British and pro-German because its tendency--one means, of course, its unconscious tendency--often is to elevate the German name for veracity and for courage above the British. I call it ludicrous, because it has censored such matter as Kipling's "Recessional" and Browning's poetry. I call it incompetent because one can perceive no sort of collective efficiency in its work. And because of the sum of these things I give it the final descriptive--"incredible."--Daily News, January 7, 1916.

There is no doubt that people often fear to tell of German good deeds. An acquaintance of mine told me that his boy got decorated for bringing in a badly wounded comrade from near the German trenches. A little shamefacedly my informant went on: "I don't mind telling you, but I shouldn't like it to be known generally here, that I know the Germans act well sometimes. My boy wrote he would have had no chance, but he heard the Germans give the order to cease fire." My informant evidently feared the neighbours would call him pro-German if he told this to them, but he thought he might venture to tell a pacifist.

One notices this fear sometimes in rather amusing ways. In a railway compartment with me were a loud-mouthed patriotic woman "war-worker" and a mere soldier back from the front. I'm afraid I got a little at loggerheads with the war-worker, who adopted in argument a kind of furious grin which revealed a formidable row of teeth that in my mind-picture of her have become symbolically almost gigantic. I turned for relief to the mere soldier, and while the train was moving we had a pleasant dip into soldier philosophy. "I've come to the conclusion that there's good and bad everywhere," he said. "I've known bad Germans, and I've known Germans to look after our wounded as well as a British Tommy could look after his chum." There was more to this effect, but whenever the train stopped and our voices became audible to others, we were silent. The fear of that row of teeth was, I think in both our hearts, and I could see the mere soldier looking timid before them.

Fair play to the enemy's character is a concession not quite so easy to the average Englishman as he supposes. "The Anglo-Saxon race has never been remarkable for magnanimity towards a fallen foe." Just now, when we are inclined to be almost afraid of the excess of chivalry which possesses us, there may be useful corrective in these words of Lieutenant-General Sir William Butler, K.C.B. There has been much searching of old history books of late to find out what was said in the days of Tacitus against the Germans. (What Tacitus said in their favour is not considered.) Perhaps on the other side there are investigators searching their history books for ancient opinions of the English. "Strike well these English," said Duke William to his Normans, "show no weakness towards these English, for they will have no pity for you. Neither the coward for running well, nor the bold man for fighting well will be better liked by the English, nor will any be more spared on either account." Butler approved this verdict. We shall not readily agree with him. Yet he did not speak without cause: he had known an English general kick the dead body of an African King, who "was a soldier every inch of him," and he had known the colonists spit upon an African chief brought bound and helpless through Natal. ("Far Out," p. 131.) I believe myself there is a great and ready generosity in the hearts of the English people, but he must surely be a man invariably on the "correct" side who has not more than once come across the official Englishman who could be a bully to those in his power.

SOME BRITISH OPINIONS.

"I am disgusted by the accounts I see in the papers of the inferiority of Germans as soldiers. Don't believe one word of it. They are quite splendid in every way. Their courage, efficiency, organisation, equipment and leading are all of the very best, and never surpassed by any troops ever raised. They come on in masses against our trenches and machine guns, and come time after time, and they are never quiescent, but always on the offensive. I am full of admiration for them, and so are all who know anything about them. It is a pity that such fine soldiers should have behaved so badly in Belgium and here; they have behaved badly, there is no doubt about it, but nothing like what is said of them--any way in parts I have been through." These words from a General Officer commanding a brigade occur in a letter published in the Times of November 19, 1914. Yet these "quite splendid" fighters are the men of whom a learned professor appointed by the Government has written that they are "rotten to the core." There is some discrepancy here. "They are great workers, these Germans," wrote Philip Gibbs (Daily Chronicle, July 5, 1916), "and wonderful soldiers."

"An officer of the Sydney gave a quite enthusiastic account of the officers of the Emden. 'Vitthoef, the torpedo lieutenant, was a thoroughly nice fellow. Lieutenant Schal was also a good fellow and half English. It quite shook them when they found that the captain had asked that there be no cheering on entering Colombo, but we certainly did not want cheering with rows of badly wounded men (almost all German) laid out in cots on the quarter deck. Captain von Mueller is a very fine fellow.... The day he was leaving the ship at Colombo, he came up to me on the quarter-deck and thanked me in connection with the rescue of the wounded, shook hands and saluted, which was very nice and polite of him.... Prince Hohenzollern was a decent enough fellow. In fact, we seemed to agree that it was our job to knock one another out, but there was no malice in it.' This is the ideal fighting, 'with no malice in it.' It has been achieved by many English and Germans, and that gives hope for the future. Let us make the most, not the least, of what points towards a better understanding.... At the beginning of November 'Eye-Witness' records how English prisoners had been sheltered by the Germans in cellars to protect them from the bombardment of their own side. An Anglo-Indian tells of a wounded havildar who was noticed by a German officer. 'The German officer spoke to him in Hindustani, asking him the number of his regiment, and where he came from. He bound up his wounds, gave him a drink, and brought him a bundle of straw to support his head. This will be remembered to the credit side of our German account.'

"A wounded officer addressed some students at one of our universities. He protested humorously that he was not a 'pro-German,' and then spoke up for a fair view of the enemy. When he was being carried into hospital, he noticed an anti-aircraft gun just outside the hospital. This struck him as, to say the least, unwise. He expected the hospital to be shelled, and this occurred. He did not blame the Germans. On another occasion a farm near the firing line was used for first aid. It was not obviously a hospital and was fired on. The Commanding Officer sent a note to Von Kluck to explain matters, and the farm was never after exposed to fire. He had seen a church damaged by German shell fire, but this was one which he had himself seen used by the French for observation purposes. The same officer uttered a warning against believing all that was in the 'Tommies' letters. At one time when he was censoring letters, one passed through his hands from a Tommy only just arrived in France, and never in the firing line. He described an immense battle in which the English did wonders and he himself had marvellous duties to perform. As far as the military situation was concerned the letter was quite harmless, so it was allowed to go through. It was something like the intelligence to the publication of which the Press Bureau 'does not object.'"

In her book, "My War Experiences on Two Continents," Miss Macnaughten writes of the Germans: "Individually, I always like them, and it is useless to say I don't. They are all polite and grateful, and I thought to-day, when the prisoners were surrounded by a gaping crowd, that they bore themselves very well." (p. 127). Again, "I found one young German with both hands smashed. He was not ill enough to have a bed, of course, but sat with his head fallen forward trying to sleep on a chair. I fed him with porridge and milk out of a little bowl, and when he had finished half of it he said, 'I won't have any more. I am afraid there will be none for the others.'" (p. 37.) Unfortunately, Miss Macnaughten too readily accepted war stories. She writes of "country houses" where he heard German prisoners here lived in luxury, "and they say girls are allowed to come and play lawn tennis with them." The humour of this will be apparent to any who have visited internment camps. Lawn tennis was, however, possible at some camps, both here and in Germany--there were seven courts at Ruhleben. Some of the atrocity stories many of us will recognise as not so reliable as Miss Macnaughten supposed. It is her personal experiences which are important, and, like the Scotchman (whom she quotes) she has, not hatred, but respect, for the Germans whom she herself meets.

THE EASE OF ACCUSATION.

Again and again, everywhere, we find readiness to accept stories against the enemy on very slender evidence. At the time of the loss of our three cruisers I saw in one of the better newspapers a large heading, "German Treachery. Fighting under the Dutch Flag." I looked down the columns for evidence. No mention of such a circumstance in the official report, none in the letter from the chief correspondent; but at last I found that some one at Harwich had "heard of" such an incident. We must remember that only cool and clear intellects are likely at such a time to give an accurate account of facts. Between others mutual recrimination may readily arise. An officer on H.M.A.S. Sydney wrote after the attack on the Emden: "It was very interesting talking to some of the German officers afterwards. On the first day they were on board one said to me, 'You fire on the white flag.' I at once took the matter up, and the torpedo-lieutenant and an engineer (of the Emden) both said emphatically, 'No, that is not so; you did not fire on the white flag.' But we did not leave it at that. One of us went to the captain, and he got from Captain von Mueller an assurance that we had done nothing of the kind, and that he intended to assemble his officers and tell them so." Note how readily on the other side, amongst those less responsible or less cool-headed, a tale may grow up against us. Let us observe in considering tales against them the same caution that we should wish them to exercise in considering tales against us.

TROOPS IN OCCUPATION.