children,
and who could hardly be expected to realise how they got into such a
scrape. One, a young mechanic, a lad with a bright rosy face, discovered
that I was a Socialist, and, with finger on lip, he told me that he also
was one. He whispered the great names of Jaures, Keir Hardie, and
Liebknecht; I could read in his eyes the hope these names roused in him,
but I could also see that he was scarcely old enough to know his own
mind, and that he might be brutally killed ere he had lived long enough
to strengthen his hopes and to see his goal clearly through the maze of
his youthful dreams.

There were types on the French side corresponding more or less closely
to these.

It is true that the French peasant drinks wine in the place of beer,
eats less than the German, is lighter in build and in wits, but apart
from these superficial differences there is much similarity. Under an
outside show of brains, both are often of dull and shallow intelligence.
The German cracks heavy jokes and the French cynical ones: it is
difficult to choose between them as both show little culture and an
inherent commonplaceness of mind.

Men of greater sensibility, of refined culture, I have found on either
side, and be they French or German, I have nearly always found their
behaviour correspond to that which I have here tried to delineate.

Most of these men had seen many ghastly things, the horrors of which
often remained impressed in their eyes for days and days after their
arrival in hospital. It is often said that the trade of war, the heavy
slaughter in which they have participated, is bound to brutalise them. I
readily believe this to be so in the case of the most vulgar types on
either side, though, even on these, the brutalising and demoralising
effect of the war seems less to be feared than amongst their
corresponding types among the civilians.

It is amongst the soldiers and officers of the fighting ranks that I
have found the greater readiness to fraternise with the enemy, to
acknowledge the good points of the other side.

The men in my ward one day having sent coffee to their French comrades,
the latter replied by sending cigarettes, and soon both sides were
conversing together. The men who have stood face to face in the fight,
who have seen their enemies falling as bravely as they themselves have
done, have little hatred left in their hearts; but those who have
suffered all the horrors of war and who have not found either