"And when are you going back to fight those vermin again?" asked the
man in the corner.
"D'ye mean ole Fritz?" said the soldier.
"I mean those Huns," said the other.
"Oh, there's nothing wrong with ole Fritz," replied the soldier. "He
can't help hisself. He's shoved out there in the mud to fight same as
we are, and he does the job same as we do. But he'd jolly well like to
chuck the business and go home. Course he would. Stands to reason.
Anybody would."
It was a disappointing reply to the man in the corner, who obviously
felt that the other was wanting in the first essential of a soldier--a
personal hatred of the individual enemy. This man clearly did not hate
the enemy. Yet if anyone was entitled to hate him he had abundant
reason. He had been out since August, 1914, had been wounded four
times, buried by shell explosion three times, and gassed twice. It was
two years since he had been home on leave, and now he was on his way to
see his people in the West of England. He talked about his experiences
with the calm dispassionateness of one describing commonplace things,
quite uncomplainingly, very sensibly, and without the least trace of
egotism. He'd been in a horrible spot lately, "reg'lar death-trap," at
G----. "Nobody can hold it," he said. "We take it when we like, and
Fritz, he takes it when _he_ likes. That's all there is about it." It
was noticeable that he always spoke of the enemy as "Fritz," and always
without any appearance of personal animus.
I do not record the incident as unusual. I record it as usual. No one
who has had much intercourse with soldiers at the front, whether rank
or file, will dispute this. In any circumstances, it is hard to nurse
a passion at white heat over a term of years, and it is impossible to
do so when you see the ugly business of war at close quarters. You
have to be comfortably at home to really enjoy the luxury of hate. I
have heard more bitter things from the lips of clergymen and seen more
bitter things from the pen of so-called comic journalists than I have
heard from the lips of soldiers, and in that admirable collection of
utterances of hate in Germany, made by Mr. William Archer, it will be
found that the barbaric things generally come from the pulpits or the
studies of be-spectacled professors.
The soldier is too near the foul business, sees all the misery and
suffering too close, to be consumed with hate. If he could envy the
other fellow he would stand a better chance of hating him. But he sees
that Fritz is in no better plight than himself. He is living in the
mud among the rats too, and is just as helpless an atom in the machine
of war as himself. He sees his body, torn and disgusting, cumbering
the battlefield, or hanging limp and horrible on the barbed wire in No
Man's Land. It is Fritz's turn to-day; it may be his own to-morrow.
And the baser feeling gives place to a general compassion. The chord
of a common humanity is struck, and if he does not actually love his
enemy he ceases to hate him.
But the man in the corner of the carriage need have no fear that this
means that the soldier opposite is a less valuable fighting man in
consequence. The idea that you must grind your teeth all the time is
an infantile delusion. I should have much more confidence in that
quiet, sane, undemonstrative soldier in the face of the enemy than I
should have in the people who kill the enemy with their mouth, and
prove their patriotism by the violence of their language. I have known
many brave men who have given their lives heroically in this war, but I
cannot recall one--not one--who stained his heroism with vulgar hate.
The gospel of hate as the instrument of victory, indeed, is not the
soldier's gospel at all. There have been few greater soldiers in
history than General Lee, and probably no more saintly man. He fought
literally to the last ditch, but he never ceased to repudiate the
doctrine of hate. When the minister in the course of a sermon had
expressed himself bitterly about the enemy, Lee said to him: "Doctor,
there is a good old Book which says, 'Love your enemies.' Do you think
that your remarks this evening were quite in the spirit of that
teaching?" And when one of his generals exclaimed of the enemy, "I
wish these people were all dead," Lee answered, "How can you say so?
Now, I wish they were all at home attending to their business and
leaving us to do the same." And Lee stated his attitude generally when
he said: "I have fought against the people of the North because I
believed they were seeking to wrest from the South dearest rights. But
I have never cherished bitter or vindictive feelings and have never
seen the day when I did not pray for them."
There was a striking illustration of the contrast between the soldier's
and the civilian's attitude towards the enemy the other day. In the
current issue of _Punch_ I saw a poem by Sir Owen Seaman (the author of
that heroic line, "I hate all Huns"), addressed to the "Huns," in which
he said:
But where you have met your equals,
Gun for gun and man for man,
We have noticed other sequels,
It was always you that ran.
In the newspapers that same morning (5th March, 1918) there appeared a
report from Sir Douglas Haig, in the course of which he said:
Many of the hits upon our Tanks at Flesquieres were obtained by a
German artillery officer who, remaining alone at his battery, served a
field gun single-handed until killed at his gun. The great bravery of
this officer aroused the admiration of all ranks.
The same chivalrous spirit breathes through the letters of Captain
Ball, V.C., published in the memoir of the brilliant airman. He was
little more than a boy when he was killed after an almost unparalleled
career of victory in the air. He fought with a terrible skill, but he
had no more personal animus for his opponent than he would have had for
the bowler whom it was his business to hit to the boundary. In one of
his letters to his father he said:
You ask me to let the devils have it when I fight. Yes, I always let
them have all I can, but really I don't think them devils. I only
scrap because it is my duty, but I do not think anything bad about the
Huns. He is just a good chap with very little guts, trying to do his
best. Nothing makes me feel more rotten than to see them go down, but
you see it is either them or me, so I must do my best to make it a case
of _them_.
And the gay, healthy temper in which he played his part is revealed in
another letter, in which he describes a fight that ended in mutual
laughter:
We kept on firing until we had used up all our ammunition. There was
nothing more to be done after that, so we both burst out laughing. We
couldn't help it--it was so ridiculous. We flew side by side laughing
at each other for a few seconds, and then we waved adieu to each other
and went off. He was a real sport was that Hun.
That is a pleasant picture to carry in the mind, the two high-spirited
boys sent out to kill each other, faithfully trying to do their duty,
failing, and then riding through the air side by side with merry
laughter at their mutual discomfiture and gay adieus at parting.
And at the risk of hurting the feelings of the man in the corner I
shall recall a letter which shows that even among the enemy of to-day,
even among that worst of all military types, the German officer, there
are those whom the miseries and horrors of war touch to something
nobler than hate. The letter appeared in the _Cologne Gazette_ early
in the war, and was as follows:
Perhaps you will be so good as to assist by the publication of these
lines in freeing our troops from an evil which they feel very strongly.
I have on many occasions, when distributing among the men the postal
packets, observed among them postcards on which the defeated French,
English and Russians were derided in a tasteless fashion.
The impression made by these postcards on our men is highly noteworthy.
Scarcely anybody is pleased with these postcards; on the contrary,
everyone expresses his displeasure.
This is natural when one considers the position. We know how victories
are won. We also know by what tremendous sacrifices they are obtained.
We see with our own eyes the unspeakable misery of the battlefield. We
rejoice over our victories, but our joy is damped by the recollection
of the sad pictures which we observe almost daily.
And our enemies have in an overwhelming majority of cases truly not
deserved to be derided in such a way. Had they not fought so bravely
we should not have had to register such losses.
Insipid, therefore, as these postcards are in themselves, their effect
here, on the battlefields, in the presence of our dead and wounded, is
only calculated to cause disgust. Such postcards are as much out of
place on the battlefield as a clown is at a funeral. Perhaps these
lines may prove instrumental in decreasing the number of such postcards
sent to our troops.
I do not suppose they did. I have no doubt the fire-eaters at home
went on fire-eating under the impression that that was what the men at
the front wanted to keep up their fighting spirit. But it is not.
There is plenty of hate in the trenches, but it is directed, not
against the victims of war, but against the institution of war. That
is the one ray of hope that shines over the dismal landscape of Europe
to-day.