Belgium and the occupied territory of France. Came also the gasping
torture of "gas," the use of flame jets, and a new exacerbation of the
savagery of the actual fighting. For a time it seemed as though the
taking of prisoners along the western front would cease. Tales of
torture and mutilation, tales of the kind that arise nowhere and out of
nothing, and poison men's minds to the most pitiless retaliations,
drifted along the opposing fronts....

The realities were evil enough without any rumours. Over various
dinner-tables Mr. Britling heard this and that first-hand testimony of
harshness and spite. One story that stuck in his memory was of British
prisoners on the journey into Germany being put apart at a station from
their French companions in misfortune, and forced to "run the gauntlet"
back to their train between the fists and bayonets of files of German
soldiers. And there were convincing stories of the same prisoners robbed
of overcoats in bitter weather, baited with dogs, separated from their
countrymen, and thrust among Russians and Poles with whom they could
hold no speech. So Lissauer's Hate Song bore its fruit in a thousand
cruelties to wounded and defenceless men. The English had cheated great
Germany of another easy victory like that of '71. They had to be
punished. That was all too plainly the psychological process. At one
German station a woman had got out of a train and crossed a platform to
spit on the face of a wounded Englishman.... And there was no monopoly
of such things on either side. At some journalistic gathering Mr.
Britling met a little white-faced, resolute lady who had recently been
nursing in the north of France. She told of wounded men lying among the
coal of coal-sheds, of a shortage of nurses and every sort of material,
of an absolute refusal to permit any share in such things to reach the
German "swine." ... "Why have they come here? Let our own boys have it
first. Why couldn't they stay in their own country? Let the filth die."