The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife eBook
Edward Carpenter
The British officer who the other day picked up a
wounded German soldier and carried him across into
the German lines, acted in quite the same spirit.
He saw that the man had been left accidentally when
the Germans were clearing away their wounded; and
quite simply he walked forward with the object of
restoring him. But it cost him his life; for the
Germans, not at first perceiving his intention, fired
and hit him in two or three places. Nevertheless
he lifted the man and succeeded in bearing him to
the German trench. The firing of course ceased,
and the German colonel saluted and thanked the officer,
and pinned a ribbon to his coat. He returned
to the British lines, but died shortly after of the
wounds received.
“Ils sont superbes, ces braves!” said
a French soldier in hospital to Mrs. Haden Guest,
indicating the German wounded also there. And
a dying German whispered to her: “I would
never have fought against the French and English had
I known how kind they were. I was told that I
was only going on manoeuvres!"[29]
The French are generous in the recognition of bravery.
A small company rushed a Prussian battery in the neighbourhood
of the Aisne and put all the gunners out of action,
except one who fought gamely to the last and would
not give in till he was fairly surrounded and made
prisoner. “Tu est chic, tu—tu
est bien chic” shouted the pioupious
with one accord, and shook him cordially by the hand
as they led him away. How preposterous do such
stories as these make warfare appear!—and
others, such as the two opposing forces tacitly agreeing
to fetch water at the evening hour from an intervening
stream without molestation on either side; or the
two parties using an old mill as a post-office, by
means of which letters could pass between France and
Germany in defiance of all decent war-regulations!
How they illustrate the absolutely instinctive and
necessary tendency of the natural man (notwithstanding
occasional bouts of fury) to aid his fellow and fall
into some sort of understanding with him! Finally
the fraternizations last Christmas between the opposing
lines in Northern France almost threatened at one
time to dissolve all the proprieties of official warfare.
If they had spread a little farther and lasted a little
longer, who knows what might have happened? High
politics might have been utterly confounded, and the
elaborate schemes of statesmen on both sides entirely
frustrated. Headquarters had, through the officers,
to interfere and all such demonstrations of amity
to be for the future forbidden. Could anything
more clearly show the beating of the great heart of
Man beneath the thickly overlying husks of class and
class-government? When, oh! when indeed, will
the real human creature emerge from its age-long chrysalis?
FOOTNOTES:
[27] And even the hundred and one humane Associations
of to-day derive a great part of their enthusiasm
and vitality from fighting each other!
