Leaves in the Wind

by A. G. Gardiner

ON HATE AND THE SOLDIER

"And when are you going back to fight those vermin again?" asked the man in the corner.

"D'ye mean ole Fritz?" said the soldier.

"I mean those Huns," said the other.

"Oh, there's nothing wrong with ole Fritz," replied the soldier. "He can't help hisself. He's shoved out there in the mud to fight same as we are, and he does the job same as we do. But he'd jolly well like to chuck the business and go home. Course he would. Stands to reason. Anybody would."

It was a disappointing reply to the man in the corner, who obviously felt that the other was wanting in the first essential of a soldier—a personal hatred of the individual enemy. This man clearly did not hate the enemy. Yet if anyone was entitled to hate him he had abundant reason. He had been out since August, 1914, had been wounded four times, buried by shell explosion three times, and gassed twice. It was two years since he had been home on leave, and now he was on his way to see his people in the West of England. He talked about his experiences with the calm dispassionateness of one describing commonplace things, quite uncomplainingly, very sensibly, and without the least trace of egotism. He'd been in a horrible spot lately, "reg'lar death-trap," at G——. "Nobody can hold it," he said. "We take it when we like, and Fritz, he takes it when he likes. That's all there is about it." It was noticeable that he always spoke of the enemy as "Fritz," and always without any appearance of personal animus.

I do not record the incident as unusual. I record it as usual. No one who has had much intercourse with soldiers at the front, whether rank or file, will dispute this. In any circumstances, it is hard to nurse a passion at white heat over a term of years, and it is impossible to do so when you see the ugly business of war at close quarters. You have to be comfortably at home to really enjoy the luxury of hate. I have heard more bitter things from the lips of clergymen and seen more bitter things from the pen of so-called comic journalists than I have heard from the lips of soldiers, and in that admirable collection of utterances of hate in Germany, made by Mr. William Archer, it will be found that the barbaric things generally come from the pulpits or the studies of be-spectacled professors.

The soldier is too near the foul business, sees all the misery and suffering too close, to be consumed with hate. If he could envy the other fellow he would stand a better chance of hating him. But he sees that Fritz is in no better plight than himself. He is living in the mud among the rats too, and is just as helpless an atom in the machine of war as himself. He sees his body, torn and disgusting, cumbering the battlefield, or hanging limp and horrible on the barbed wire in No Man's Land. It is Fritz's turn to-day; it may be his own to-morrow. And the baser feeling gives place to a general compassion. The chord of a common humanity is struck, and if he does not actually love his enemy he ceases to hate him.

But the man in the corner of the carriage need have no fear that this means that the soldier opposite is a less valuable fighting man in consequence. The idea that you must grind your teeth all the time is an infantile delusion. I should have much more confidence in that quiet, sane, undemonstrative soldier in the face of the enemy than I should have in the people who kill the enemy with their mouth, and prove their patriotism by the violence of their language. I have known many brave men who have given their lives heroically in this war, but I cannot recall one—not one—who stained his heroism with vulgar hate.

The gospel of hate as the instrument of victory, indeed, is not the soldier's gospel at all. There have been few greater soldiers in history than General Lee, and probably no more saintly man. He fought literally to the last ditch, but he never ceased to repudiate the doctrine of hate. When the minister in the course of a sermon had expressed himself bitterly about the enemy, Lee said to him: "Doctor, there is a good old Book which says, 'Love your enemies.' Do you think that your remarks this evening were quite in the spirit of that teaching?" And when one of his generals exclaimed of the enemy, "I wish these people were all dead," Lee answered, "How can you say so? Now, I wish they were all at home attending to their business and leaving us to do the same." And Lee stated his attitude generally when he said: "I have fought against the people of the North because I believed they were seeking to wrest from the South dearest rights. But I have never cherished bitter or vindictive feelings and have never seen the day when I did not pray for them."

There was a striking illustration of the contrast between the soldier's and the civilian's attitude towards the enemy the other day. In the current issue of Punch I saw a poem by Sir Owen Seaman (the author of that heroic line, "I hate all Huns"), addressed to the "Huns," in which he said:

But where you have met your equals,
Gun for gun and man for man,
We have noticed other sequels,
It was always you that ran.

In the newspapers that same morning (5th March, 1918) there appeared a report from Sir Douglas Haig, in the course of which he said:

Many of the hits upon our Tanks at Flesquières were obtained by a German artillery officer who, remaining alone at his battery, served a field gun single-handed until killed at his gun. The great bravery of this officer aroused the admiration of all ranks.

The same chivalrous spirit breathes through the letters of Captain Ball, V.C., published in the memoir of the brilliant airman. He was little more than a boy when he was killed after an almost unparalleled career of victory in the air. He fought with a terrible skill, but he had no more personal animus for his opponent than he would have had for the bowler whom it was his business to hit to the boundary. In one of his letters to his father he said:

You ask me to let the devils have it when I fight. Yes, I always let them have all I can, but really I don't think them devils. I only scrap because it is my duty, but I do not think anything bad about the Huns. He is just a good chap with very little guts, trying to do his best. Nothing makes me feel more rotten than to see them go down, but you see it is either them or me, so I must do my best to make it a case of them.

And the gay, healthy temper in which he played his part is revealed in another letter, in which he describes a fight that ended in mutual laughter:

We kept on firing until we had used up all our ammunition. There was nothing more to be done after that, so we both burst out laughing. We couldn't help it—it was so ridiculous. We flew side by side laughing at each other for a few seconds, and then we waved adieu to each other and went off. He was a real sport was that Hun.

That is a pleasant picture to carry in the mind, the two high-spirited boys sent out to kill each other, faithfully trying to do their duty, failing, and then riding through the air side by side with merry laughter at their mutual discomfiture and gay adieus at parting.

And at the risk of hurting the feelings of the man in the corner I shall recall a letter which shows that even among the enemy of to-day, even among that worst of all military types, the German officer, there are those whom the miseries and horrors of war touch to something nobler than hate. The letter appeared in the Cologne Gazette early in the war, and was as follows:

Perhaps you will be so good as to assist by the publication of these lines in freeing our troops from an evil which they feel very strongly. I have on many occasions, when distributing among the men the postal packets, observed among them postcards on which the defeated French, English and Russians were derided in a tasteless fashion.

The impression made by these postcards on our men is highly noteworthy. Scarcely anybody is pleased with these postcards; on the contrary, everyone expresses his displeasure.

This is natural when one considers the position. We know how victories are won. We also know by what tremendous sacrifices they are obtained. We see with our own eyes the unspeakable misery of the battlefield. We rejoice over our victories, but our joy is damped by the recollection of the sad pictures which we observe almost daily.

And our enemies have in an overwhelming majority of cases truly not deserved to be derided in such a way. Had they not fought so bravely we should not have had to register such losses.

Insipid, therefore, as these postcards are in themselves, their effect here, on the battlefields, in the presence of our dead and wounded, is only calculated to cause disgust. Such postcards are as much out of place on the battlefield as a clown is at a funeral. Perhaps these lines may prove instrumental in decreasing the number of such postcards sent to our troops.

I do not suppose they did. I have no doubt the fire-eaters at home went on fire-eating under the impression that that was what the men at the front wanted to keep up their fighting spirit. But it is not. There is plenty of hate in the trenches, but it is directed, not against the victims of war, but against the institution of war. That is the one ray of hope that shines over the dismal landscape of Europe to-day.