One dare not think of all the misery, sadness, and sorrow that greets
one where the fighting has been; lifelong efforts and struggling dashed
to the ground in the space of an hour or so. You quiet English folks,
with your beautiful homes and orderly lives, cannot realize what a
modern war means. You must spend night after night in cattle trucks,
where groaning, dying men are lying on straw; you must imagine the
interior of those trucks, only lighted with a dripping oil lamp; you
must see the pale, drawn faces and the red-stained limbs; then you must
stop and ask yourself if you are really in the twentieth century, or
if you are not dreaming. How one gets to love the light and the sun
after such nightmares, even when the Germans were so near, and that
with the dawn we knew the sing-song of the cannons would start again. I
could have yelled with joy at the first signs of daylight: _An English
Interpreter_.