In courage I do not think there was much difference between the chief
combatants. The Germans, as a race, were wonderfully brave until their
spirit was broken by the sure knowledge of defeat and by lack of food.
Many times through all those years they marched shoulder to shoulder,
obedient to discipline, to certain death, as I saw them on the Somme,
like martyrs. They marched for their Fatherland, inspired by the
spirit of the German race, as it had entered their souls by the memory
of old German songs, old heroic ballads, their German home life, their
German women, their love of little old towns on hillsides or in
valleys, by all the meaning to them of that word Germany, which is
like the name of England to us--who is fool enough to think
otherwise?--and fought often, a thousand times, to the death, as I saw
their bodies heaped in the fields of the Somme and round their pill-
boxes in Flanders and in the last phase of the war behind the
Hindenburg line round their broken batteries on the way of Mons and Le
Cateau.
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