rs of
Champagne gather in their vintage though the bombs of the rival armies
explode around them--and we, too, can do our share! There is work for
all who find themselves outside the battle. Especially for those who
still can write, it seems to me that there should be something better to
do than to brandish a pen dipped in blood and seated at their tables to
cry "Kill! Kill!" I hate the war, but even more do I hate those who
glorify it without taking part. What would we say of officers who
marched behind their men? The noblest role of those who follow in the
rear is to pick up their friends who fall, and to bear in mind even
during the battle those fair words so often forgotten--_Inter arma
caritas_.

* * * * *

Amidst all the misery which every man of feeling can do his share to
relieve, let us recall the fate of the prisoner of war. But knowing that
Germany today blushes at her former sentimentality, I carefully refrain
from appealing to her pity by whinings, as they call them, about the
destruction of Louvain and Rheims. "War is war." Granted!--then it is
natural that it drags in its train thousands of prisoners, officers and
men.

For the moment I shall say only a word about these, in order to comfort
as far as possible the families who are searching for them, and are so
anxious about their fate. On both sides hateful rumors circulate only
too easily, rumors given currency by an unscrupulous press, rumors which
would have us believe that the most elementary laws of humanity are
trampled under foot by the enemy. Only the other day an Austrian friend
wrote to me, maddened by the lies of some paper or other, to beg me to
help the German wounded in France, who are left without any aid. And
have I not heard or read the same unworthy fears expressed by Frenchmen
as regards their wounded, who are said to be maltreated in Germany? But
it is all a lie--on both sides; and those of us whose task it is to
receive the true information from either camp must affirm the contrary.
Speaking generally (for in so many thousands of cases one cannot, of
course, be sure that there will not here and there be individual
exceptions) this war, whose actual conduct has provoked a degree of
harshness which our knowledge of previous wars in the West would not
have allowed us to expect, is by contrast less cruel to all
those--prisoners and wounded--who are put out of the battle line.

The letters that we receiv