appreciate what they try and do for
them in the trenches. If you ask what the billets are like, they say,
"Barns and suchlike; they do the best they can for us." If you ask if
the trench conditions are as bad for the Germans, they say, "They're
worse off; they ain't looked after like what we are."

9.30 P.M.--On way to Havre. I was just going to say that from the Seine
to Le Havre there is nothing to report, when I came across a young
educated German in my wards with his left leg off from the hip, and his
right from below the knee, and a bad shell wound in his arm, all healed
now, done at Ypres on 24th October. And I had an hour's most thrilling
and heated conversation with him in German. He was very down on the
English Sisters in hospital, because he says they hated him and didn't
treat him like the rest. I said that was because they couldn't forget
what his regiment (Bavarians) had done to the Belgian women and
children and old men, and the French. And he said _he_ couldn't forget
how the Belgian women had put out the eyes of the German wounded at
Liege and thrown boiling water on them. I said they were driven to
it.[2] I asked him a lot of straight questions about Germany and the
War, and he answered equally straight. He said they had food in Germany
for ten years, and that they had ten million men, and that all the
present students would be in the Army later on, and that practically the
supply could never stop. And I said that however long they could go on,
in the end there would be no more Germany because she was up against
five nations. He said no man has any fear of a Russian soldier, and that
though they were slow over it they would get Paris, but not London
except by Zeppelins; he admitted that it would be _sehr schwer_ to land
troops in England, and that our Navy was the best, but we had so few
soldiers, they hardly counted! He got very excited over the Zeppelins. I
asked why the Germans hated the English, and he said, "In Berlin we do
not speak of the English at all(!!!); it is the French and the Russians
we hate." He said the Turks were no good _zu helfen_, and Austria not
much better. He was very down on Belgium for resisting in the first
place! and said the _Schuld_ was with France and Russia. They were very
much astonished when England didn't remain neutral! He had the cheek to
say that three German soldiers were as good as twenty English, so I
assured him that five English could do for fifty Germans, and