There were many of this type, and many others who seemed like children, and who could hardly be expected to realise how they got into such a scrape. One, a young mechanic, a lad with a bright rosy face, discovered that I was a Socialist, and, with finger on lip, he told me that he also was one. He whispered the great names of Jaurés, Keir Hardie, and Liebknecht; I could read in his eyes the hope these names roused in him, but I could also see that he was scarcely old enough to know his own mind, and that he might be brutally killed ere he had lived long enough to strengthen his hopes and to see his goal clearly through the maze of his youthful dreams.
There were types on the French side corresponding more or less closely to these.
It is true that the French peasant drinks wine in the place of beer, eats less than the German, is lighter in build and in wits, but apart from these superficial differences there is much similarity. Under an outside show of brains, both are often of dull and shallow intelligence. The German cracks heavy jokes and the French cynical ones: it is difficult to choose between them as both show little culture and an inherent commonplaceness of mind.
Men of greater sensibility, of refined culture, I have found on either side, and be they French or German, I have nearly always found their behaviour correspond to that which I have here tried to delineate.
Most of these men had seen many ghastly things, the horrors of which often remained impressed in their eyes for days and days after their arrival in hospital. It is often said that the trade of war, the heavy slaughter in which they have participated, is bound to brutalise them. I readily believe this to be so in the case of the most vulgar types on either side, though, even on these, the brutalising and demoralising effect of the war seems less to be feared than amongst their corresponding types among the civilians.
It is amongst the soldiers and officers of the fighting ranks that I have found the greater readiness to fraternise with the enemy, to acknowledge the good points of the other side.
The men in my ward one day having sent coffee to their French comrades, the latter replied by sending cigarettes, and soon both sides were conversing together. The men who have stood face to face in the fight, who have seen their enemies falling as bravely as they themselves have done, have little hatred left in their hearts; but those who have suffered all the horrors of war and who have not found either in work, or even in participation in the war itself, a means to cool their overheated feelings, are those who constitute the real danger for the future work of the pacifists, as, after all, the brutalising effect of war is not due so much to the use of physical force as to the hatred which such physical force, bent on destruction, brings in its wake.
What I say here of the men does not, however, apply to the professional officers. Amongst the Germans these are mostly of the aristocracy. Their haughty, scarred faces were always repellent to me. Luckily I was not told off to nurse them. They had a special room of their own.
Once only, at lunch time, when their usual nurse was away at her lunch, one of them beckoned to me as I was passing their door. Thinking that he wanted something, I went up to him, but he received me by putting out his tongue and taking a “sight” at me, to the amusement of all his friends. This young scamp was no other than Lieutenant von W——, the son of General von W——. We all knew that he was a cad and Pupuce himself seemed to find him rather a handful.
I met very few French officers during my stay at Lille, but my knowledge of the professional military man in time of peace, leads me to believe that the type I have described, is far from uncommon in France. He is the embodiment of militarism anywhere, and neither in Germany nor elsewhere will these men’s brutal instincts be checked through war, or even through defeat.