These lookout posts for observing and directing gun fire carry a portable telephone, adapted to sudden changes of position.
What war does is to reveal human nature. It does not alter it. It heightens the brutality and the heroism. Selfishness shines out nakedly and kindliness is seen clearer than in routine peace days. War brings out what is inside the person. Sentimental pacifists sit around three thousand miles away and say, "War brutalizes men," and when I hear them I think of the English Tommies giving me their little stock of cigarettes for the Belgian soldiers. Then I read the militarists and they say, "Be hard. Live dangerously. War is beneficent," and I see the wrecked villages of Belgium, with the homeless peasants and the orphaned babies. War ennobles some men by sacrifice, by heroism. It debases other men by handing over the weak to them for torture and murder. What is in the man comes out under the supreme test, where there are no courts of appeal, no public opinion, no social restraint; only the soldier alone with helpless victims.
You can't share the chances of life and death with people, without feeling a something in common with them, that you do not have even with life-long friends. The high officer and the cockney Tommy have that linking up. There was one person whom I couldn't grow to like. But with him I have shared a ticklish time, and there is that cord of connection. Then, too, one is glad of a record of oneself. There is some one to verify what you say. You have passed through an unbelievable thing together, and you have a witness.
Henri, our Belgian orderly, has that feeling for us, and we for him. It isn't respect, nor fondness, alone. Companionship meant for him new shirts, dry boots, more chocolate, a daily supply of cigarettes. It meant our seeing the picture of wife and child in Liège, hearing about his home. It was the sharing of danger, the facing together of the horror that underlies life, and which we try to forget in soft peace days. The friendships of war are based on a more fundamental thing than the friendships of safe living. In the supreme experience of motherhood, the woman goes down alone into the place of suffering, leaving the man, however dear, far away. But in this supreme experience of facing death to save life, you go together. The little Belgian soldier is at your side. Together you sit tight under fire, put the bandages on the wounded, and speed back to a safer place.
Once I went to the farthest outpost. A Belgian soldier stepped out of the darkness.
"Come along, miss, I've a good gun. I'll take you."
Walking up the road, not in the middle where machine guns could rake us, but huddled up by the trees at the siding, we went. It will be a different thing to meet him one day in Antwerp, than it will be to greet again the desk-clerk of the La Salle Hotel in Chicago. It lies deeper than doing you favors, and assigning a sunny room.
The men are not impersonal units in an army machine. They become individuals to us, with sharply marked traits. It is impossible to see them as cases. Out of the individuals, we built our types—we constructed our Belgian soldier, out of the hundreds who had told us of their work and home.
"You must have met so many you never came to know their stories."
It was the opposite. Paul Collaer, who played beautifully; Gilson, the mystic; Henri of Liège; the son of Ysaye, they were all clear to us. There was a splendid fat doctor who felt physical fear, but never shirked his job. He used to go and hide behind the barn, with his pipe, till there was work for him. His wasn't the fear that spreads disaster through a crowd. He was fat and funny. A fat man is comfortable to have around, at any time, even when he is unhappy. No one lost respect for this man. Every one enjoyed him thoroughly.