the German. Both
sides have started the firing, and are already enemies again. Strange it
all seems, doesn't it?" (_Nation_, January 2, 1915.)

"These Germans were enduring the same hardships, and the same squalor.
There was only pity for them and a sense of comradeship, as of men
forced by the cruel gods to be tortured by fate. This sense of
comradeship reached strange lengths at Christmas, and on other days.
Truces were established and men who had been engaged in trying to kill
each other came out of opposite trenches and fraternised. They took
photographs of mixed groups of Germans and English, arm-in-arm. They
exchanged cigarettes, and patted each other on the shoulder, and cursed
the war.... The war had become the most tragic farce in the world. The
frightful senselessness of it was apparent when the enemies of two
nations fighting to the death stood in the grey mist together and liked
each other. They did not want to kill each other, these Saxons of the
same race and blood, so like each other in physical appearance, and with
the same human qualities.... The monstrous absurdity of war, this
devil's jest, stood revealed nakedly by those little groups of men
standing together in the mists of Flanders.... It became so apparent
that army orders had to be issued stopping such truces."

It is only by artificial stimulus, by artificially made ignorance, that
war can be kept going in these days. By which I do not mean to imply
that commanders and leaders are wilfully cruel men; but the leaders on
each side are afraid lest _their_ men should give up fighting first. To
be the first to acknowledge brotherhood seems like being the first to
give in, and actually does foreshadow serious dangers. And yet the time
will come when we shall have to face danger for the sake of brotherhood,
as we do now for the sake of self-assertion. The orders to avoid
friendship with the enemy were, even in these circumstances, not always
obeyed. "For months after German and British soldiers in neighbouring
trenches fixed up secret treaties by which they fired at fixed targets
at stated periods to keep up appearances and then strolled about in
safety, sure of each other's loyalty." (Gibbs, "The Soul of the War," p.
351.) Prisoners were sent back to their own trenches, and sometimes went
with great reluctance.

WOUNDED.

"He told me how on the night he had his own wound French and German
soldiers talked together by light of the moon, which shed