There's a deal of truth in those
words. Why should this go on? What's it all about? Let the old men who
made this war come and fight it out among themselves, at Hooge. The
fighting-men have no real quarrel with one another. We all want to go
home to our wives and our work."

But neither side was prepared to "go home" first. Each side was in a
trap--a devil's trap from which there was no escape. Loyalty to their
own side, discipline, with the death penalty behind it, spell words of
old tradition, obedience to the laws of war or to the caste which ruled
them, all the moral and spiritual propaganda handed out by pastors,
newspapers, generals, staff-officers, old men at home, exalted women,
female furies, a deep and simple love for England and Germany, pride
of manhood, fear of cowardice--a thousand complexities of thought and
sentiment prevented men, on both sides, from breaking the net of fate in
which they were entangled, and revolting against that mutual, unceasing
massacre, by a rising from the trenches with a shout of, "We're all
fools!... Let's all go home!"

In Russia they did so, but the Germans did not go home, too. As an army
and a nation they went on to the Peace of Brest-Litovsk and their doom.
But many German soldiers were converted to that gospel of "We're all
fools!" and would not fight again with any spirit, as we found at times,
after August 8th, in the last year of war.

III

The men remained in the trenches, and suffered horribly. I have told
about lice and rats and mine-shafts there. Another misery came to
torture soldiers in the line, and it was called "trench-foot." Many men
standing in slime for days and nights in field boots or puttees lost all
sense of feeling in their feet. These feet of theirs, so cold and wet,
began to swell, and then to go "dead," and then suddenly to burn as
though touched by red-hot pokers. When the "reliefs" went up scores
of men could not walk back from the trenches, but had to crawl, or be
carried pick-a-back by their comrades, to the field dressing stations.
So I saw hundreds of them, and, as the winter dragged on, thousands. The
medical officers cut off their boots and their puttees, and the socks
that had become part of their skins, exposing blackened and rotting
feet. They put oil on them, and wrapped them round with cotton-wool,
and tied labels to their tunics with the name of that new
disease--"trench-foot." Those medical officers looked serious as the
n