d out into
the white ash of patient misery. Certainly there was no passion of
hatred against the enemy, not far away there in the trenches. These
Germans were enduring the same hardships, and the same squalor.
There was only pity for them and a sense of comradeship, as of men
forced by the cruel gods to be tortured by fate.

This sense of comradeship reached strange lengths at Christmas,
and on other days. Truces were established and men who had been
engaged in trying to kill each other came out of opposite trenches and
fraternized. They took photographs of mixed groups of Germans and
English, arm-in-arm. They exchanged cigarettes, and patted each
other on the shoulder, and cursed the war. . . . The war had become
the most tragic farce in the world. The frightful senselessness of it
was apparent when the enemies of two nations fighting to the death
stood in the grey mist together and liked each other. They did not
want to kill each other, these Saxons of the same race and blood, so
like each other in physical appearance, and with the same human
qualities. They were both under the spell of high, distant Powers
which had decreed this warfare, and had so enslaved them that like
gladiators in the Roman amphitheatres they killed men so that they
should not be put to death by their task-masters. The monstrous
absurdity of war, this devil's jest, stood revealed nakedly by those
little groups of men standing together in the mists of Flanders. ... It
became so apparent that army orders had to be issued stopping
such truces. They were issued but not always obeyed. For months
after German and British soldiers in neighbouring trenches fixed up
secret treaties by which they fired at fixed targets at stated periods to
keep up appearances, and then strolled about in safety, sure of each
other's loyalty.

From one trench a German officer signalled to one of our own
lieutenants:

"I have six of your men in my trench. What shall I do with them?"

The lieutenant signalled back.

"I have two of yours. This is ridiculous."

The English officer spoke to the two Germans:

"Look here, you had better clear out. Otherwise I shall have to make
you prisoners."

"We want to be prisoners," said the Germans, who spoke English
with the accent of the Tottenham Court Road.

It appears that the lieutenant would not oblige them, and begged
them to play the game.

So with occasional embarrassments like this to break the deadly
monotony of li