"Ich bin verwundet. Behüte dich Gott. Küsse das Kind. Es soll fromm sein." And then the pencil stops forever. The writing on that final page of all is regular and firm up to the "Ich bin verwundet." Those last four sentences are each just a line long, as if each was a cry. He wrote the word "Küsse" and could hardly rally himself. His pencil slips into three marks without meaning, then he writes "das Kind." I trust my German readers will not deny me the use of this diary. It is the only one of which I have not seen the original. The photographic reproduction is my only evidence of this flash of tenderness among a thousand acts of infamy. The diaries are little black-covered pocket copybooks: the sort that women in our country use for the family accounts. They contain about 100 pages. They average five inches in length and three in width. A few of the diaries, and those mostly belonging to officers, are written in ink. But most of them are in pencil, occasionally in black, but the large majority in purple. Many of the diaries are curt records of daily marches and military operations. The man is too tired to write anything but distances, names of places, engagements. That was what the Great German General Staff had in mind in ordering the practice. They could not foresee what would slip through into the record, because in all their calculations they have always forgotten the human spirit. Once again we are indebted to German thoroughness. The causes, the objects, the methods of this war, will not be in doubt, as in other wars of the past. History will be clear in dealing its judgments. Like the surgeon's ray on a fester, German light has played on the sore spots. So the soldiers have gone on making their naked records of crimes committed and their naïve mental reactions on what they did, till all too late the German machine forbade further exposure of the national soul. But the faithful peasant fingers had written what all eternity cannot annul. "These booklets, stained, bruised, sometimes perforated by bayonet or torn by splinters of shell, the pencilings in haste, day by day, in spite of fatigue, in spite even of wounds"--they are the most human documents of the war.