h he stopped, saluted, and, pointing with his hand, said
'Your trenches are there. Good day.'

My second story, the story of the British lieutenant in No-man's land,
is briefer. I was with a friend of mine, a young officer back from the
front, wounded, and the conduct of German officers was being discussed.
He said, 'You can't expect me to be very hard on German officers, for
one of them saved my life'. He then told how he and a companion crept
out into No-man's land to bring in some of our wounded who were lying
there. When they had reached the wounded, and were preparing to bring
them in, they were discovered by the Germans opposite, who at once
whipped up a machine-gun and turned it on them. Their lives were not
worth half a minute's purchase, when suddenly a German officer leapt up
on to the parapet, and, angrily waving back the machine-gunners, called
out, in English, 'That's all right. You may take them in.'

These are no doubt exceptional cases; the rule is very different. But a
good many of such cases are known to soldiers, and I have seen none of
them in the press. Soldiers are silent by law, and journalists either do
not hear these things, or, believing that hate is a valuable asset,
suppress all mention of them. If England could ever be disgraced by a
mishap, she would be disgraced by having given birth to those
Englishmen, few and wretched, who, when an enemy behaves generously,
conceal or deny the fact. And consider the effect of this silence on the
Germans. There are some German officers, as I said, who are better than
the German military handbooks, and better than their monstrous chiefs.
Which of them will pay the smallest attention to what our papers say
when he finds that they collect only atrocities, and are blind to
humanity if they see it in an enemy? He will regard our press accounts
of the German army as the work of malicious cripples; and our perfectly
true narrative of the unspeakable brutality and filthiness of the German
army's doings will lose credit with him.

If I had my way, I would staff the newspaper offices, as far as
possible, with wounded soldiers, and I would give some of the present
staff a holiday as stretcher-bearers. Then we should hear more of the
truth.

Is it feared that we should have no heart for the War if once we are
convinced that among the Germans there are some human beings? Is it
believed that our people can be heroic on one condition only, that they
shall be asked