Yesterday evening I was strangely touched. I happened to see a convoy of prisoners and I talked to one of them, a colleague of mine, Professor of classical philology in the college of F----. Such an open-minded, intelligent man, and with such a fine military bearing, like all his fellows, although they had just been through a terrible experience of machine-gun fire.... It was a proof to me of the senselessness of the war. I thought how much one would have liked to be the friend of these men, who are so near us in their education, their mode of life, the circle of their thought and their interest. We started talking about a book on Rousseau and we began to dispute like old philologists.... How much we are alike in force and worth! And how little truth there is in what our papers tell us of the shaken and exhausted conditions of the French troops! As true, or rather as untrue, as what the French newspapers write about us.... My French colleague showed in his remarks such a balanced mind and such understanding and admiration of German thought! To think that we were made so clearly to be friends and that we had to be separated! I was altogether overcome, and sat down crushed by it. I thought and thought and could not escape my mood by any sophistry. No end, no end to war, which for nearly six months now has swallowed in its gulf men, fortunes, and happiness! And this feeling is the same with us as with the other side. It is always the same picture: we do the same thing, we suffer the same thing, we are the same thing. And it is precisely for this reason that we are so bitterly at enmity.... The same accent of troubled anguish, together with a despair which at moments nearly reaches to madness, and at others breathes a religious fervor, are seen in the letters of a German soldier to a teacher in German Switzerland. (We have known of these at the Prisoners' Agency for three or four months and they were published in _Foi et Vie_ of April 15th.[39] They have been passed over in silence, so we shall persist in calling attention to them, for they thoroughly deserve it). In these letters, which cover from the second fortnight of August to the end of December, we see from the 25th of August onwards the evidence of a desire for peace among the German soldiers. We all, even those who were hottest for the fight at the beginning, want nothing now but peace, our officers just as much as ourselves.... Convinced as we are of the necessity to conquer, warlike enthusiasm does not exist among us; we fulfil our duty, but the sacrifice is hard. We suffer in our souls.... I cannot tell you the sufferings I endure....