I could think that the baby with both legs off will grow up
without missing what it has never known. I wish I could be reconciled
because the dead young officer had died the death of a patriot and a
soldier, or that the boy I saw dying in an upper room, from shock and
loss of blood following an amputation, is only a pawn in the great
chess game of empires. I wish I could believe that the two women on
the floor below, one with both arms gone, another with one arm off and
her back ripped open by a shell, are the legitimate fruits of a holy
war. I cannot. I can see only greed and lust of battle and ambition.

In a bright room I saw a German soldier. He had the room to himself.
He was blue eyed and yellow haired, with a boyish and contagious
smile. He knew no more about it all than I did. It must have
bewildered him in the long hours that he lay there alone. He did not
hate these people. He never had hated them. It was clear, too, that
they did not hate him. For they had saved a gangrenous leg for him
when all hope seemed ended. He lay there, with his white coverlet
drawn to his chin, and smiled at the surgeon. They were evidently on
the best of terms.

"How goes it?" asked the surgeon cheerfully in German.

"_Sehr gut_," he said, and eyed me curiously.

He was very proud of the leg, and asked that I see it. It was in a
cast. He moved it about triumphantly. Probably all over Germany, as
over France and this corner of Belgium, just such little scenes occur
daily, hourly.

The German peasant, like the French and the Belgian, is a peaceable
man. He is military but not militant. He is sentimental rather than
impassioned. He loves Christmas and other feast days. He is not
ambitious. He fights bravely, but he would rather sing or make a
garden.

It is over the bent shoulders of these peasants that the great
Continental army machines must march. The German peasant is poor,
because for forty years he has been paying the heavy tax of endless
armament. The French peasant is poor, because for forty years he has
been struggling to recover from the drain of the huge war indemnity
demanded by Germany in 1871. The Russian peasant toils for a remote
government, with which his sole tie is the tax-gatherer; toils with
childish faith for The Little Father, at whose word he may be sent to
battle for a cause of which he knows nothing.

Germany's militarism, England's navalism, Russia's autocracy, France,
graft-ridden in high places an