in its train thousands of prisoners, officers and men.
For the moment I shall say only a word about these, in order to comfort as far as possible the families who are searching for them, and are so anxious about their fate. On both sides hateful rumours circulate only too easily, rumours given currency by an unscrupulous press, rumours which would have us believe that the most elementary laws of humanity are trampled under foot by the enemy. Only the other day an Austrian friend wrote to me, maddened by the lies of some paper or other, to beg me to help the German wounded in France, who are left without any aid. And have I not heard or read the same unworthy fears expressed by Frenchmen as regards their wounded, who are said to be maltreated in Germany? But it is all a lie—on both sides; and those of us whose task it is to receive the true information from either camp must affirm the contrary. Speaking generally (for in so many thousands of cases one cannot, of course, be sure that there will not here and there be individual exceptions) this war, whose actual conduct has provoked a degree of harshness which our knowledge of previous wars in the West would not have allowed us to expect, is by contrast less cruel to
