Mrs. Haden Guest, indicating the German wounded also there. And a dying
German whispered to her: "I would never have fought against the French
and English had I known how kind they were. I was told that I was only
going on manoeuvres!"[29]

The French are generous in the recognition of bravery. A small company
rushed a Prussian battery in the neighbourhood of the Aisne and put all
the gunners out of action, except one who fought gamely to the last and
would not give in till he was fairly surrounded and made prisoner. "_Tu
est chic, tu--tu est bien chic_" shouted the _pioupious_ with one
accord, and shook him cordially by the hand as they led him away. How
preposterous do such stories as these make warfare appear!--and others,
such as the two opposing forces tacitly agreeing to fetch water at the
evening hour from an intervening stream without molestation on either
side; or the two parties using an old mill as a post-office, by means of
which letters could pass between France and Germany in defiance of all
decent war-regulations! How they illustrate the absolutely instinctive
and necessary tendency of the natural man (notwithstanding occasional
bouts of fury) to aid his fellow and fall into some sort of
understanding with him! Finally the fraternizations last Christmas
between the opposing lines in Northern France almost threatened at one
time to dissolve all the proprieties of official warfare. If they had
spread a little farther and lasted a little longer, who knows what might
have happened? High politics might have been utterly confounded, and
the elaborate schemes of statesmen on both sides entirely frustrated.
Headquarters had, through the officers, to interfere and all such
demonstrations of amity to be for the future forbidden. Could anything
more clearly show the beating of the great heart of Man beneath the
thickly overlying husks of class and class-government? When, oh! when
indeed, will the real human creature emerge from its age-long chrysalis?