Mutual Fears
Each side fears the barbarity of the other. “Would it be good military policy,” asked a military official, “to encourage any other idea?” “‘My comrades were afraid,’ said this German sergeant. ‘They cried out to me that the Indians would kill their prisoners, and that we should die if we surrendered. But I said, ‘That is not true, comrades, and is only a tale. Let us go forward with our hands up.’ So in that way we went, and the Indian horsemen closed about us, and I spoke to one of them, asking for mercy for our men, and he was very kind and a gentleman, and we surrendered to him safely.’ He was glad to be alive, this man from Wiesbaden. He showed me the portrait of his wife and boy, and cried a little, saying that the German people did not make the war, but had to fight for their country when told to fight, like other men.... He waved his hand back to the woodlands, and remembered the terror of the place from which he had just come. ‘Over there it was worse than death.’” Yes, and “If any man were to draw the picture of those things or to tell them more nakedly than I have told them, because now is not the time, nor this the place, no man or woman would dare to speak again of war’s ‘glory,’ or of ‘the splendour of war,’ or any of those old lying phrases which hide the dreadful truth.” (Philip Gibbs in the Daily Chronicle, July 18, 1916.)