In “Plug Street” and other lines of trenches they stood in water with walls of oozy mud about them, until their legs rotted and became black with a false frostbite, until many of them were carried away with bronchitis and pneumonia, and until all of them, however many comforters they tied about their necks, or however many body-belts they used, were shivering, sodden scarecrows, plastered with slime.  They crawled with lice, these decent Englishmen from good clean homes, these dandy men who once upon a time had strolled down the sweet shady side of Pall Mall, immaculate, and fragrant as their lavender kid gloves.  They were eaten alive by these vermin and suffered the intolerable agony of itch.  Strange and terrible diseases attacked some of them, though the poisonous microbes were checked by vigilant men in laboratories behind the front before they could spread an epidemic.  For the first time men without science heard the name of cerebro-spinal meningitis and shuddered at it.  The war became a hopeless, dreary thing, without a thrill to it, except when men wading in water were smashed by shell-fire and floated about in a bloody mess which ran red through all a trench.  That was a thrill of beastliness, but gave no fire to men’s hearts.  Passion, if it had ever burnt in these British soldiers’ hearts, had smouldered 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.