Wounded.
“He told me how on the night he had his own wound French and German soldiers talked together by light of the moon, which shed its pale light upon all those prostrate men, making their faces look very white. He heard the murmurs of their voices about him, and the groans of the dying, rising to hideous anguish as men were tortured by ghastly wounds and broken limbs. In that night enmity was forgotten by those who had fought like beasts and now lay together. A French soldier gave his water-bottle to a German officer who was crying out with thirst. The German sipped a little and then kissed the hand of the man who had been his enemy. ‘There will be no war on the other side,’ he said. Another Frenchman—who came from Montmartre—found lying within a yard of him a Luxembourgeois whom he had known as his chasseur in a big hotel in Paris. The young German wept to see his old acquaintance. ‘It is stupid,’ he said, ‘this war. You and I were happy when we were good friends in Paris. Why should we have been made to fight with each other?’ He died with his arms round the neck of the soldier, who told me the story unashamed of his own tears.” (Gibbs, l.c. p. 282) “At one spot where there had been a fierce hand-to-hand fight, there were indications that the combatants when wounded had shared their water bottles.” (Sheffield Telegraph, November 14, 1914.)
The following letter must not be forgotten. It was found at the side of a dead French cavalry officer: “There are two other men lying near me, and I do not think there is much hope for them either. One is an officer of a Scottish regiment, and the other is a private in the Uhlans. They were struck down after me, and when I came to myself, I found them bending over me, rendering first aid. The Britisher was pouring water down my throat from his flask, while the German was endeavouring to staunch my wound with an anti-septic preparation served out to them by their medical corps. The Highlander had one of his legs shattered, and the German had several pieces of shrapnel buried in his side. In spite of their own suffering they were trying to help me, and when I was fully conscious again, the German gave us a morphia injection and took one himself. His medical corps had also provided him with the injection and the needle, together with printed instructions for its use. After the injection, feeling wonderfully at ease, we spoke of the lives we had lived before the war. We all spoke English, and we talked of the women we had left at home. Both the German and the Britisher had only been married a year. I wondered, and I suppose the others did, why we had fought each other at all....” (Daily Citizen, December 21, 1914. Quoted in Edward Carpenter’s “The Healing of Nations,” p. 261.)