“I take no credit for any special courage in the field. If I was brave
it was because I had to be so. We were all brave who kept our senses.
We became accustomed to a large degree to the incessant intimacy with
dangers and death. We could look at frightful things without wincing.”
He knows no word with which to describe war as he saw it. Hell is far
too weak a word. “It is more horrible than the slaughter house, because
the forms of death planned are more cruel, more mad, more devilish. We
fight underground and under sea. We fight with fire, with steel, with
lead, with poison, with burning oil, with gases. We are lower than the
brutes, lower than the most degraded forms of life.... I am only Roméo
Houle, a barber. But I have lived—God! I have lived. All the slaughter
of heroes by the Meuse and on the Belgian border and in Northern France
has passed before my eyes. And I, Roméo Houle, am forced to write
this: ‘We cannot make ourselves better nor the world more worth while
by killing each other like beasts gone mad.... I hope never to fight
again.’”
And here is a final reflection of the soldier who confesses “I do not
know why we fought.”
“No Archduke’s little life was worth the titanic butchery of the world
war. The beginning was petty and small. And I, looking back at horror,
horror, horror, cannot forget the extraordinary friendships we made
with the men in the enemy’s trenches. We were both only human beings,
after all, Fritz and I. We had no wish to kill each other. We had much
rather sit at the same table, with our wives and children around us,
and talk of gardens, of fair pictures, and of great books. But for
our officers and the nations which they represented peace would have
been declared right there in the trenches—and that by the soldiers
themselves.”