They wrote these things in tragic letters--thousands
of them--which never reached their homes in Germany, but lay in their
captured ditches.
"The number of dead lying about is awful. One stumbles over them."
"The stench of the dead lying round us is unbearable."
"We are no longer men here. We are worse than beasts."
"It is hell let loose." . . . "It is horrible." . . . "We've lived
in misery."
"If the dear ones at home could see all this perhaps there would be a
change. But they are never told."
"The ceaseless roar of the guns is driving us mad."
Poor, pitiful letters, out of their cries of agony one gets to the
real truth of war-the "glory" and the "splendor" of it preached by the
German philosophers and British Jingoes, who upheld it as the great
strengthening tonic for their race, and as the noblest experience of
men. Every line these German soldiers wrote might have been written by
one of ours; from both sides of the shifting lines there was the same
death and the same hell.
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