THE GERMAN

Wairarapa Times-Age, 29 May 1940, Page 2

THE GERMAN

BOY WITH A REFRESHING SMILE MAN NEVER THE ENEMY OF MAN. HOPES OF FINDING WAYS TO END WAR. A high mountain range, or marching feet, or a certain kind of dusty yellow road still strive to call to memory the German boy of 1914, writes R. L. B. in an American paper. The two of us who knew him for a fleeting roadside hour or two never knew his name never spoke of him except as “the German.”

He was a tall, gangling fellow with a broad smile and large banners of almost girlish pink complexion draping from his high cheekbones. His stiff yellow hair, cut pompadour style leaned forward over his forehead instead of back from it, as if a wind were always blowing from behind him. He caught up with the two of us — two indolent and very warm midsummer hikers in the great American desert —as we skirted the base of Mount Whitney and its neighbour mountains, Inyo Valley side. He brought his swinging boots to a stop in front of us and looked down at us as we squatted on our packs.. His smile was refreshing. His even teeth were large and very white and contrasted pleasantly with the vivid pink of his cheeks.

“Hi!” he greeted us, and we two smiled back at the hiker’s eternal greeting, “Hi!” He sat down with us long enough to tell us what he knew about the war in Europe-—the World War, only that name came much later. We had not heard. We had seen no newspapers for ever so long. We didn’t realise at the time what the German boy, with his soft accent, was telling us. Perhaps he didn’t either. Someone has shot someone else in Servia. (That was the way it was spelled in 1914). An Archduke had been assassinated. France had stepped in between Austria and Servia, and now Germany was in it. The trouble had been going on for some days. A war was in progress. A real war. We didn’t know. “I am in the res-serve,” the German boy said. “I must go back now to the Army. I must report to the German Consul in San Francisco.”

We, the hikers, were young men, too, His story was plausible enough to believe. We knew something, not much, about Serbia, something, not much, about Archdukes in Austria. The part that didn’t make sense was that this boy, who had come to America to ■establish himself, probably as a farmer somewhere down the valley behind us, should haul up stakes and go back over to Europe to carry a gun against men in a cause so remote. We didn’t know. No one knew —then.

The German boy nad supper with us, We made a sagebrush fire by the roadside along about dark. We had cold biscuits warmed over from breakfast; beans, bacon, coffee—the hiker’s regular fare.

A full moon came up as the sun went down. The German boy had no blankets with him. Didn’t need.them, he said. Didn’t expect to sleep anywhere until he reported to that consul in San Francisco. We offered to share our four stout Army blankets with him but he declined. “I must hur-ree,” he said. “I am on duty now after the call has been issued.” He was hiking to Carson City and hoped to get a ride from there to San Francisco.

We watched his swinging legs as far up the road as we could see them. He turned and waved to us once in the white desert moonlight. A pleasant fellow. He would have been a good comrade on any kind of a journey, long or short. A cheery one. A high-principled fellow, too. He couldn’t rest after the call to duty had been issued, but must walk day and night to make rendezvous with that duty. So we went our way, we two hikers. Many things took our attention for the next three years . . . From 1914 to 1917 I thought very little about the German boy. Then America entered the war. I enlisted. The issues seemed very clear to me then—much clearer than they do now nearly a quarter of a century later. “To make the world safe for democrasy” was no empty phrase in 1917. It filled men’s hearts as the thought of Finland’s heroic plight fills them today. We forget our ardours and even the causes of them as decades drift downstream behind us. I remember no hatred. The German boy of that Inyo County road came often into my thoughts. “Hun?” “Prussian?” “Boche?” None of those fitted him. In the Army we were called upon to hate. Not in so many words. But men do not fight ideas on the battlefield. They may fight for or against ideas, but the physical fighting is man against man—that is war.

There was infantry drill, plenty of it, even for us white-hat-banded flying cadets. Bayonet drill. Better not say too much about that. That is something of a soldier’s secret.

The German boy of Inyo. Valley troubled my sleep the night I first took bayonet drill. No, I never could have used that bayonet as the drill sergeant had instructed—not on that gangling, pink-cheeked, likeable German lad. Probably not on any of his fellows, either.

Later on, some months later on, there was combat practice in airplanes. I never actually met an “enemy” soldier in air or on battlefield in the World War. I never reached the front. But I saw, in fancy, my “enemy” many limes. He was always the same, always smiling, friendly, courageous, true to his vows. He was no enemy at all. but a man.

And now that the Armistice of 1918 has come of age and the war that stopped seems to have started again at somewhere near where it left off, and as I read again of “enemy-this” and “enemy-that,” I know —after twenty years of thinking it over —I know more positively than ever than man is never the enemy of man —cannot possibly be. A man may hate what he believes to be a wrong idea. That is where the hatreds of people are directed in wars, surely. The men themselves are likeable, admirable, courageous, true—on both sides of the fighting front. The greatest hope of which I knew — and it is a growing hope around the world —is that men learned partly from the last war. and will learn conclusively from this one, this vital fact about each other. There are signs which say it is being learned. When men really learn that truth about each other, they will find ways to settle their differences without war.