His patient smiled again at our innocence. "We have ten million trained soldiers in reserve, who have not yet been called up," he answered calmly.
We were not prepared at the time to dispute the veracity of these statements, although later events seem to have corroborated them.
There was a grim heroism about this cold-blooded man, for when he was placed upon the operating table, although he must have suffered greatly while the deeply embedded bullet was being extracted under cocaine, he permitted no groan or complaint to escape his lips. However much we may hate the Prussians, or loathe their materialistic and unsentimental attitude toward their fellow human beings, if this man was a sample, they are as well prepared to suffer as to inflict pain. Proud, disdainful and bitter, one could not help but feel that he hated us so thoroughly that should the opportunity have occurred, he would have killed his attendants without a qualm of conscience.
The contrast between this prisoner's mental attitude and that of one of my Bavarian patients was striking. The latter had had his left arm cruelly shattered, and on dressing it I discovered a large ragged wound above the elbow. He spoke no English, so that I was obliged to use my indifferent German.
"Wie geht es dieser Morgen?" I asked him.
"Ganz gut," he replied, as he looked up with a grateful smile at hearing his native tongue. He continued in German: "The nurses have been very good to me, but my arm pains greatly."
We carried on a more or less desultory conversation while the dressing was proceeding, but, by dint of getting him to speak slowly, I managed to understand him fairly well. Wishing to estimate his frame of mind as compared with the Prussian, I remarked:
"I presume you feel badly over being taken prisoner?"
"No," he replied slowly; "I am glad. To us Germans this war means a fight to the death; there are only two ways of escape: being crippled for life—or this. You will wonder at my confessing that I am glad, but I have left behind me in Heidelberg all that I love best on earth—my wife and two little children——" His voice choked and tears came into his eyes, but after a moment he sighed: "God knows whether I shall ever see them again—for me the war is over—it is just as well."
Do you blame one for forgetting that this man was an enemy? "One touch of sympathy" in spite of the horrors of war, still "makes the whole world kin." We may hate the Germans en masse, but heart cannot help going out to heart, and in the weeks that followed I confess, without apology, that I learned to look upon this man as a friend.