“Germany no longer cares whom she hurts,” runs another passage in this letter; “like an unloved child at bay she means, to smash and kill. The pity of it! Never was there a more generous, soft-hearted, kindly people. Germany, the land of the Christmas tree and folk songs, and hearthsides and gay childish laughter, turned into a relentless fighting machine! But each individual is a cog firmly fixed in the machine, which will go ever on as long as the ruling power turns the crank.”[73] TWO SOLDIERS’ LETTERS. “If I were not firmly convinced that even this war will help to establish the Kingdom of God I could hardly endure it. But I believe that after passing through this hell humanity will come to itself and learn to believe in the reign of human brotherhood.... I cannot tell you the moral suffering I go through. These butcheries are utter madness. I cannot forget for a moment that our enemies are men, and consequently our brothers.” So wrote a young German soldier student quoted by Mr. Jerome K. Jerome. The following letter is from the _Vossische Zeitung_. A soldier’s young sister had written asking him to “kill a lot of Russians” and “to gain a new victory in order to cheer us up.” “‘Kill a lot of Russians.’ You have not seen them lying about—those poor dead, with their singularly solemn faces.... You have not seen the battle which preceded, and the bad wounds which so many of my friends got in trying to kill a lot of them. You do not think of the fact that those dead men had parents, brothers, and sisters whom they loved. And you have not seen the harrowing destruction of the villages and towns—how the poor, hunted-down population is running away, leaving everything they had behind them to be consumed by the flames.... And then, remember, we are not fighting in order to cheer you up—we are not lying about in the open-air day and night, starved and suffering from wounds and homesickness, in order that you at home may be cheerful at the tea or beer table. We are fighting and bearing this terrible wretchedness in order that you may he spared the horrors of war, and that Germany’s future may be bright.” That is, I believe, what the enormous majority of Germany’s soldiers are fighting for. Soldiers on both sides have similar and quite reconcilable aims; but government is too complex to express the simple will of the people. In every country, it seems to me, anti-militarist opinion only needs its chance. I was struck by the frequency with which such an opinion cropped up when I was travelling a few weeks in Germany not long before the war. On the top of the Belchen I encountered it in talking to a native of Würtemberg. Again in a walk with a young German to the Feldberg; again in a book-shop at Freiburg; again in chance railway talk with a very well-educated German on my way to Berlin. In Berlin itself a giant Westphalian accosted me, as he wanted to make the acquaintance of “one of these terrible fellows who