_La
Guerre vue d'une Ambulance_ par L'Abbe FELIX KLEIN.
"Hate as a policy is either inadequate to deal with the crimes
(real and invented) of our enemies, or, if adequate, so recoils
on the hater that he himself becomes ruined as a moral
agent."--G. JARVIS SMITH, M.C. (late Chaplain at the Western
Front). _Nation_, Nov. 2, 1918.
"The belief at home that the individual enemy is an incurable
barbarian is simply wrong...."--Second-Lieut. A. R. WILLIAMS,
killed in action August, 1917.
"I will go on fighting as long as it is necessary to get a
decision in this war.... But I will not hate Germans to the
order of any bloody politician; and the first thing I shall do
after I am free will be to go to Germany and create all the ties
I can with German life."--J. H. KEELING (B.E.F., December,
1915).
CONTENTS
CHAPTER. PAGE.
FOREWORD xi.
I. MILITARY PRISONERS 1
II. CIVILIAN PRISONERS 75
III. PRISONERS IN PREVIOUS WARS 123
IV. REPRISALS OF GOOD 132
V. WHAT THE GERMAN MAY BE 149
APPENDIX 255
FOREWORD[1]
One kind of German has been too often described, and not infrequently
invented. I propose here to describe the other German. At a military
hospital a lady visitor said to the wounded soldiers: "We've had lots of
books and tales of horror; why don't some of you fellows prepare a book
of the good deeds of the enemy?" There was a slight pause. "Ah," said
one of the soldiers, "that would be a golden book." Very imperfectly,
and in spite of all the barriers raised by war passions, I have tried to
collect some of the materials already to hand for such a book.
In any quarrel it is difficult to recognise that there is good in one's
opponent. Yet in order that any strife may be wisely settled, this
recognition is plainly necessary. Mere enmity, without recognition of
good, belongs to primitive barbarism. It was against the foolish
unpracticality of this older barbarism (not surely only against its
wickedness) that Christ protested in the words, "But I say unto you,
love your enemies." He saw around him the folly and unenlightenment of
the
|