and the thoughts of those
who have been our enemies. I wish to reconstruct my nature on a
wider basis.... And I believe that it will be easier after this war
than after any other to be a human being.

The second fragment is the account of a touching encounter with a French
prisoner:

Yesterday evening I was strangely touched. I happened to see a
convoy of prisoners and I talked to one of them, a colleague of
mine, Professor of classical philology in the college of F----.
Such an open-minded, intelligent man, and with such a fine military
bearing, like all his fellows, although they had just been through
a terrible experience of machine-gun fire.... It was a proof to me
of the senselessness of the war. I thought how much one would have
liked to be the friend of these men, who are so near us in their
education, their mode of life, the circle of their thought and
their interest. We started talking about a book on Rousseau and we
began to dispute like old philologists.... How much we are alike in
force and worth! And how little truth there is in what our papers
tell us of the shaken and exhausted conditions of the French
troops! As true, or rather as untrue, as what the French newspapers
write about us.... My French colleague showed in his remarks such a
balanced mind and such understanding and admiration of German
thought! To think that we were made so clearly to be friends and
that we had to be separated! I was altogether overcome, and sat
down crushed by it. I thought and thought and could not escape my
mood by any sophistry. No end, no end to war, which for nearly six
months now has swallowed in its gulf men, fortunes, and happiness!
And this feeling is the same with us as with the other side. It is
always the same picture: we do the same thing, we suffer the same
thing, we are the same thing. And it is precisely for this reason
that we are so bitterly at enmity....

The same accent of troubled anguish, together with a despair which at
moments nearly reaches to madness, and at others breathes a religious
fervor, are seen in the letters of a German soldier to a teacher in
German Switzerland. (We have known of these at the Prisoners' Agency for
three or four months and they were published in _Foi et Vie_ of April
15th.[39] They have been passed over in silence, so we shall persist i