It was perhaps the directness of
contact that pleased me. I suppose one felt that here at any rate one
was doing immediate practical good, relieving distress and agony that
must, by some one, be immediately relieved; and, at any rate, in the
first days at M---- when the press of wounded was terrific (we
treated, in one day and night, nine hundred wounded soldiers) there
could be no doubt of the real demand for incessant tireless work. But
there was in my pleasure more than this. It was as though, through the
bodies of the wounded soldiers, I was helping to drive home the attack
upon our enemy. By our enemy I do not mean anything as concretely
commonplace as the German nation. One scarcely considered Germany as a
definite personality. One was resolved to cripple its power because
one believed that power to be a menace to the helpless, the innocent,
the lovers of truth and beauty; but that resolve, although it never
altered, seemed (the nearer one approached the citadel) in some way to
be farther and farther removed from the real question.
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