Harold W. Picton

“ Amongst the fugitives one saw, many had run away before even seeing a German helmet, but all were full of atrocious tales, all were mad with hatred and revenge.
Not until the actual shelling of the town began did I fully realise the havoc that fear and hatred can work! To feel helpless while shells go whirling over one’s head at the rate of sixty a minute, while houses are burning on either side of one, is a horrible experience. To have to bear all these horrors without being able to put a stop to them, is maddening. At such moments one feels like a mouse caught in a trap. ”

“ A nation that can produce those folk-songs has got unusual gifts for the world. And, of course, we envy the Germans their music. Of all the contemptible utterances that this war has produced (and it has produced a good many) none has been worse than the silly blathering against German music just because it is German. What have Beethoven, Bach, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner got to do with the politics of the present war? Leaving the arts aside, it is quite certain that in any region where careful observation and painstaking thought are required, no one can afford to neglect Germany. ”

“ I have always known that hatred is the offspring of war. I am well aware that ever since the beginning of the present crisis the newspapers and the warmongers have been daily adding fuel to the fire of hatred for fear that if the fire died out the war would do the same. But over there, at Lille, I felt that hatred had fallen on the hearts of many people like a fatal malediction with which they are to be cursed all their life long and which they will transmit to their descendants. ”

“ Such caricatures always represent the outlook of war-time, but they do not make for a lasting peace. There is a great German people, and that people and ours should find each other’s hearts. I am not so much concerned as to the Germany of brilliant science and industrious commerce. That is good, but there is something better: It is the Germany of loving husbands and true comrades, of true wives and devoted mothers. It is the heart that rules the world, and we need the true hearts in Germany, England, France, and over all the world to recognise each other. ”

“ But we have not only to think of those Germans who are now abroad, not only to remember that those foreigners who are in need in Germany are for the most part Germany’s best friends and are bound to us by a thousand ties; besides all this the task is laid upon us by our own desire to render friendly service in these times of hatred to those who now find it so difficult to obtain help. Even in war time, whoever needs our help is our neighbour, and love of their enemies remains the distinguishing mark of those who are loyal to our Lord. ”

“ Kindness is reason.... We are strangers all upon this earth, and die but to be reunited.” Thus Franz Werfel. Since these words cannot be called barbaric, they will perhaps be called sentimental. It is true that to those of us who have loved our comrades, of whatever nation, the sentiment of brotherhood does just now make a somewhat tragic appeal. If that appeal, in these days of decimated ideals, be at times strained and feverish, it scarcely lies in the mouths of the apostles of hate to deride us. The sentimentality of hatred is uglier and more fatuous than the sentimentality of brotherhood. ”

“ Their boasts about their ‘culture’ are not idle boasts, and, when one comes to think of it, it is rather important to have in our midst a people that cares to boast about its culture. The Englishman is more given to complaining than boasting, and when he does boast it is certainly not about culture. As it seems to me, the Germans excel in two things—simple tenderness of sentiment and the work of patient observation. I am aware that it has for a considerable time been the mode in England to slight German literature. ”

“ A few months ago they would have preached in season and out on the advantage to England of receiving cheap goods, they would have extolled German scientific methods, and they would (with every right) have pointed out that a customer who buys forty million pounds’ worth of our goods is scarcely one whom we should wish to destroy. All these facts remain absolutely unaltered by the war. All that has happened is that a half-ashamed jealousy is no longer ashamed, and is masquerading as patriotism so successful as to have misled the majority of our countrymen—for a time. ”

“ At the present moment there lies before me the letter of a Russian soldier which refers to them: ‘What I am going to tell you,’ he says, ‘is a true miracle.’ The ‘miracle’ which had so appealed to his imagination was that, during an armistice, there were ‘handshakes and hearty acclamations on both sides, to which no description could do justice.’ ... From the very heart of war there issues this mighty protest of life against the destructive force of death. But whenever life asserts itself, its object is always to re-establish a living unity. ”

“ I do them the honour of assuming that even they do not mean that we are to translate this feeling into action; rather, even they do not dream of doing the slightest harm to any individual Englishman in so far as it is not necessary or inevitable for the purposes of victory. What then does this preaching of hatred mean, if indeed it means anything at all, and is not the mere empty clamour of some people anxious to attract attention without rendering useful service? Do they mean us to nurse and cherish the feeling of hate? ”

“ We know well that if we were Christians there would be no war.” Förster denounces the bawling haters “who must open their mouths 42 centimetres wide,” and think that he who does not do it is no patriot.
“To conquer and silence them must be your first task, young men of the new Germany; you who have been purified by sacrifice and suffering. For what would it profit our people if it gained the whole world and lost its own soul?” May we not, mutatis mutandis, take this appeal to heart ourselves? ”

“ To the soldier the prison camp is an escape from worse horrors, the soldier is inured to a large measure of monotony, he is also inured to military control and certain peculiarities of the military manner. To the civilian the prison camp is a change from freedom to confinement, from comfort to hardship, often from prosperity to ruin. The civilian’s life has been one of varied activities, and becomes one of almost unrelieved monotony. He is in most cases quite unused to military control, and feels himself degraded to a kind of servitude. ”

“ Such jealousy is a strangely short-sighted mistake. No valuable or lasting peace will come till jealousy is exorcised. There are ominous signs of the possible triumph of a deadly Saxon insularity, but there are other signs that give us hope. When so ardent a combatant as Mr. Lloyd George can speak well of the services of Germany to the world, all is not lost. It is pleasant to be able to quote these passages from an interview reported in the Daily News of January 25, 1916:
“Mr. Lloyd George is not among those who imagine they are doing their country a service by decrying everything German. ”

“ Insipid, therefore, as these postcards are in themselves, their effect here on the battlefields, in face of our dead and wounded, is only calculated to cause disgust. Such postcards are as much out of place on the battlefield as a clown is at a funeral. Perhaps these lines may prove instrumental in decreasing the number of such postcards sent to our troops.
Personally, I believe this to express the soul of the real Germany and the soul of the real England. The soul of any people is the best that is in it. ”

“ I turned to my mate and said, ‘They tell us all the Germans are barbarians, but that doesn’t look much like it.’ It was difficult to keep some of our men from firing on the Germans even then.” The last statement will surprise only those who have not been told the truth about war. Passion gets the upper hand of humanity, and indeed reason may support passion, for is not destruction of the enemy one of the chief aims of war? Shall we spare the enemy when rescuing their own wounded? ”

“ These people whom fear has driven, like cattle, from their burning houses, who have suddenly been left without a roof over their heads or food to eat, are not likely easily to give up their hatred when this passion of war is a thing of the past. Deep in their hearts will be written the word “revenge” even though France does not lose a second Alsace-Lorraine.
This same overpowering feeling of hatred I found amongst most of the staff of the hospital where I was working, and I was able to note at first hand the effect it had in the dealings of the nursing staff with the German wounded. ”

“ The obscurantist and opponent of free thought has shown signs of hope that the German’s reputation for awfulness may turn us from his evil companionship into the restful paths of British piety. The Englishman (especially, I believe, the Saxon element) has too often been prone to make a stronghold of ignorance. This stronghold has certainly in industry proved to be a house of cards, and I think it has proved to be equally a house of cards in religion. It would, indeed, be a disastrous outcome of the war if it led us still more to emphasise our insularity. ”

“ Most of us regard the German labourer as far too controlled and regulated, but everyone knows that Germany was to the fore in care for the health and well-being of the workman: “As to the factory legislation in general, not only do they afford to children and juveniles a greater measure of protection in regard to hours and other conditions of work than is enforced by the English Factory Acts, but many of their provisions for ensuring the health, comfort, and safety of all workers go beyond the limits which are thought sufficient in this country.” ”

“ No one can study philosophy without continual reference to German thought. Even in a subject so English as the study of Shakespeare the work of Gervinus is fundamental, and from the time of Lessing to that of Ten Brink there has been a succession of German commentators. Those of us who have worked at all at science know only too well what we owe to Germany there. It has, indeed, been at times painful to compare the mass of the German output with the comparatively thin stream of English work. ”

“ Unless we are readier after the war to learn from everyone, we shall, as a nation, be mentally moribund. It matters not in the least whether the thought be German, French, Austrian, Swiss, Russian, or any other. Miss Petre, in her “Reflections of a Non-Combatant,” has finely stated the wider view:
Thought and learning, art and music, may bear certain characteristics of the country in which they are begotten; but they are also the products of humanity itself, or they would make no appeal to the world at large. ”

“ Do not let us forget that almost everything that is most militarist is old. It is only the old who affect still to glory in war—the old newspapers, the old reviews, the old statesmen, and some, perhaps, of the old soldiers—it is to what is newest, youngest, most creative, most living that we look not in vain for an unshaken belief in brotherhood, for a clear acknowledgment that [231] any other belief would throw us back into the ape and tiger struggle of world beginnings, but with the ape ten thousand times more cunning and the tiger ten thousand times more cruel. ”

“ Quoted in the Daily News, May 7, 1918. Captain Ball has finished the killing in the only way boys can finish the killing now, for he is dead. The last words, Requiescat in pace, have a new poignancy in days when children are growing up who have never known peace.
Yet underneath all the wild recriminations prompted by fear and hate, there is brotherhood. For at the worst what do all these charges mean? That a few foolish men without vision have slipped into power and direct the great beast-machine that kills. That Frankenstein is apt at all times to wild, primitive cruelty. ”

“ Many of the men have lived in this country for twenty or thirty years; some have come over here as young children, some are even unable to speak German; very many have married British wives and have come to regard themselves as citizens of this country. The visit of someone who is not in authority over them, but who will listen to their troubles and give them a kind word of encouragement, has done very much to lighten the bitterness of confinement.” So write the Emergency Committee in their second report on their work for the assistance of Germans, Austrians and Hungarians in distress. ”

“ Provided we bear in mind that it takes less to provoke the victor than to provoke the vanquished, that it is more easy for the former to indulge in his temper without fear of consequences. I do not think that the atrocities perpetrated by the Germans in Belgium, the true ones as they came to my knowledge, and not the false ones which have been spread by the Press, have proved in any way that the Germans have passed the bounds of all that has been known in previous wars, and have deserved to be banned and thrust outside the pale of humanity. ”