“In spite of their own sufferings 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 wonder, and I supposed the others did, why we had fought each other at all. I looked at the Highlander, who was falling to sleep, exhausted, and in spite of his drawn face and mud-stained uniform, he looked the embodiment of freedom. Then I thought of the Tri-color of France, and all that France had done for liberty. Then I watched the German, who had ceased to speak. He had taken a prayer book from his knapsack and was trying to read a service for soldiers wounded in battle.”
“SAME PAIR OF BLUE EYES”
Sergeant Gabriel David, of the French infantry, who saw seven months of continuous service in the trenches of the Argonne Forest, described the odd effect of peeping over the top of a trench for weeks into the same pair of German blue eyes.
“I don’t know who this man was or what he might have been,” he said, “but wherever I go I can yet see those sad-looking eyes. He and I gazed at each other for three weeks in one stretch; his watch seemed to always be the same as mine. We came to respect each other. I am sure that I would always know those blue eyes, and I would like to meet that man when the war has ended.”
FIGHTING WITHOUT HATE
There is yet to appear an authentic letter from a private or officer on either side that contains a tithe of the virulence and bitterness shown in the statements and writings of many non-combatants.
“One wonders,” runs a letter of a British officer, “when one sees a German face to face, is this really one of those devils who wrought such devastation—for devastation they have surely wrought. You can hardly believe it, for he seems much the same as other soldiers. I can assure you that out here there is none of that insensate hatred that one hears about.