The Audacious War by Clarence W. Barron
page 112 of 146 (76%)
page 112 of 146 (76%)
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system, face, eye, ear, jaw, arm, leg; yet that soldier lived. She
dressed wounds where more than twenty bullets pierced a single human frame. Yet that soldier will go back to the front. French boys in their 'teens had died in her arms at the hospital,--the hospital where thousands of wounded pass through every month,--and she had taken back to the parents in Paris the dying message. She had been in the German and the French trenches on the line of battle. She had crossed the lines and been under arrest. She had seen the horrible picture of freight-loads of German corpses on German railroads,--corpses unhelmeted, with uncovered faces, but in boots and uniform, tied like cordwood in bunches of three and standing upright on their way to the lime-kilns. She had nursed the wounded German soldier in his delirium, crying in German, which she well understood, over the horrors which still pursued him as he remembered the face of the wife and saw the agony of the children as he stood in line and by direction of his superior officer shot the husband dead. He moaned in his delirium over the picture. The faces of the wife and children haunted him, but he cried out that his superior officer had ordered him to do it; and she said, "No, these people are not responsible; the dogs of war have driven them as sheep into the slaughter-pens. They are beaten, but fight for the Fatherland. It is their duty and they obey." And how has it all come about? Simply thus: The Saxon was a Saxon, the Bavarian was a Bavarian; each suddenly found himself a German and part of a world-power. Bismarck and Von Moltke had a policy for the Hohenzollerns; it was a united Germany, and they left it a defensive Germany. There was not in the brain of Bismarck or of Von Moltke, or of the Emperor under whom they prosecuted the wars against Austria, Denmark, |
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