"I'll tell you something about war," he said, "which contradicts
most every other experience. There's scarcely a great subject in
the world which you don't have to take as a whole, and from the
biggest point of view, to appreciate it thoroughly. It's exactly
different with war. If you want to understand more than the
platitudes, you want to just take in one section of the fighting.
Say there are fifty Englishmen, decent fellows, been dragged from
their posts as commercial travellers or small tradesmen or
labourers or what-not, and they get mixed up with a similar number
of Germans. Those Germans ain't the fiends we read about.
They're not bubbling over with militarism. They don't want to
lord it over all the world. They've exactly the same tastes, the
same outlook upon life as the fifty Englishmen whom an iron hand
has been forcing to do their best to kill. Those English chaps
didn't want to kill anybody, any more than the Germans did. They
had to do it, too, simply because it was part of the game. There
was a handful of German prisoners I saw, talking with their guard
and exchanging smokes. One was a barber in a country town. The
man who had him in tow was an English barber. Bless you, they
were talking like one o'clock! That German barber didn't want
anything in life except plenty to eat and drink, to be a good
husband and good father, and to save enough money to buy a little
house of his own. The Englishman was just the same.
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