In spite of all the hatreds the war has engendered—­and one of the Royal Lancasters declares that the sign manual of friendship between the French and the English soldier is “a cross on the throat indicating their wish to the Kaiser”—­there is still room for passages of fine sympathy and chivalry.  One young French lieutenant distinguished himself by carrying a wounded Uhlan to a place of safety under a heavy German fire, English soldiers have shown equal generosity and kindness to injured captives, and the tributes to heroic and patient nurses shine forth in letters of gold upon the dark pages of this tragic history.  Here is a touching letter from one of the King’s Own Royal Lancasters.  “In one hospital, which was a church,” he writes, “there was a young French girl helping to bandage us up.  How she stood it I don’t know.  There were some awful sights, but she never quailed—­just a sad sweet smile for every one.  If ever any one deserved a front seat in Heaven this young angel did.  God bless her!  She has the prayers and all the love the remnants of the Fourth Division can give her.”

And another pretty little tribute is paid to the kindness of a French lady to four English soldiers billeted at her house.  “She was wondrous kind,” writes one of the grateful soldiers, “and when we left for the front Madame and her mother sobbed and wept as if we had been their own sons.”

XI

ATKINS AND THE ENEMY

In one of his fine messages from the front, Sir John French, whom the New York World has described as the “best of war correspondents,” referred to the British soldier as “a difficult person to impress or depress.”  He meant, of course, that it was no use trying to terrify Tommy Atkins.  Nothing will do that.  His stupendous sense of humor carries him, smiling, through every emergency.

But Atkins is a keen observer, and he takes on very clear and vivid impressions of men and affairs.  He hates compromises and qualifications, and just lets you have his opinion—­“biff!” as one officer expresses it.

“Bill and I have been thinking it over,” says one letter from the trenches, “and we’ve come to the conclusion that the German army system is rotten.”  There you have the concentrated wisdom of hundreds of soldier critics who talk of the Kaiser’s great military machine as they know it from intimate contact with the fighting force it propels.  They admit its mechanical perfection; it is the human factor that breaks down.

Nothing has impressed Tommy Atkins more than the lack of morale in the German soldiers.  “Oh, they are brave enough, poor devils; but they’ve got no heart in the fighting,” he says.  That is absolutely true.  Hundreds of thousands of them have no notion of what they are fighting for.  Some of the prisoners declared that when they left the garrisons they were “simply told they were going to maneuvers”; “others,” says a Royal Artilleryman, “had no idea they were fighting the English”; according to a Highland officer, surrendering Germans said their fellows had been assured that “America and Japan were fighting on their side, and that another Boer war was going on”; and a final illusion was dispelled when those captured by the Royal Irish were told that the civil war in Ireland had been “put off!”