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 to fight no one but orangoutangs?  Our airmen fight as well as any one, in this world or above it, has ever fought; and we owe them a great debt of thanks for maintaining, and, by their example, actually teaching the Germans to maintain, a high standard of decency.

This War has shown, what we might have gathered from our history, that we fight best up hill.  From our history also we may learn that it does not relax our sinews to be told that our enemy has some good qualities.  We should like him better as an enemy if he had more.  We know what we have believed; and we are not going to fail in resolve or perseverance because we find that our task is difficult, and that we have not a monopoly of all the virtues.