...on atrocities...

On my first day at the hospital, a Scottish sergeant produced a comment of which the stark truth came finally home to me three summers afterwards. 

" We shall beat them," he said, " but they'll break our hearts first ! "

 This same man told me a story-later guaranteed as true by Roland-which once again convinced me of the futility of war between men who (as I was beginning to realise even amid the bloodthirsty armchair patriotism so rampant in England just then) bore no grudge against one another.

Once, he said, when they were opposite the Saxons near Ypres, they and the enemy made a mutual agreement not to shoot one another. In order to appear active they continued to use their rifles, but fired into the air. Occasionally they met and talked in the space between the trenches, and when, finally, the Saxons had to change places with the Prussian Guards, they promised to fire a volley as warning. This promise they faithfully observed. 

A few weeks afterwards I was given a variant on this story by a neighbour, who had heard it from a Buxton officer home on sick-leave. A similar truce, he related, had been in progress in another part of the line, where the occupants of the trenches on both sides would take it in turns to work in No Man's Land quite unmolested. In the midst of this truce, the British company commander went sick, and a fire-eating patriot took his place. On the first occasion after his arrival that a group of Saxons left their trenches and placidly began their wire-mending, the fire-eater ordered his company's machine guns to be turned on them. The men had no choice but to obey, and a large number of benevolent Saxons were ignominiously wiped out.

 Four out of the five men, said my informant, to whom the   young officer told this tale, roared with laughter and called the company commander's action " a smart piece c f work " So much, I thought, for " Hun atrocities "--for I  was already beginning to suspect, as all my generation now knows, that neither side in wartime has a monopoly of butchers and traitors. (pp.167-68)

From:  Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (London: Virago Press, 1984).  First published 1933.