"
Thus spoke the Staff, and so it is among the junior commands,
down to the semi-isolated posts where boy-Napoleons live on
their own, through unbelievable adventures. They are
inventive young devils, these veterans of 21, possessed of the
single ideal--to kill--which they follow with men as
single-minded as themselves. Battlefield tactics do not exist;
when a whole nation goes to ground there can be none of the
"victories" of the old bookish days. But there is always the
killing--the well-schemed smashing of a full trench, the rushing
out and the mowing down of its occupants; the unsuspicious
battalion far in the rear, located after two nights' extreme
risk alone among rubbish of masonry, and wiped out as it eats or
washes itself; and, more rarely, the body to body encounter with
animals removed from the protection of their machinery, when the
bayonets get their chance. The Boche does not at all like
meeting men whose womenfolk he has dishonoured or mutilated, or
used as a protection against bullets. It is not that these men
are angry or violent. They do not waste time in that way. They
kill him.
THE BUSINESS OF WAR
The French are less reticent than we about atrocities
committed by the Boche, because those atrocities form part of
their lives.
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