There’s not the least doubt that we have the whip hand of the Germans now, and it’s only a question of time until we knock them under altogether. Their officers simply won’t hear of letting them surrender, and so long as there’s an officer about they’ll stand like sheep and be slaughtered by the thousand. They fear their officers ten times worse than they fear death. When there isn’t an officer about they’re quick enough to surrender. Some of them have been kept marching night and day for days on end. It’s a horrible sight to see some of them used up as they have been; and they hate their officers like poison for what they have had to go through: _Private King_.
One dare not think of all the misery, sadness, and sorrow that greets one where the fighting has been; lifelong efforts and struggling dashed to the ground in the space of an hour or so. You quiet English folks, with your beautiful homes and orderly lives, cannot realize what a modern war means. You must spend night after night in cattle trucks, where groaning, dying men are lying on straw; you must imagine the interior of those trucks, only lighted with a dripping oil lamp; you must see the pale, drawn faces and the red-stained limbs; then you must stop and ask yourself if you are really in the twentieth century, or if you are not dreaming. How one gets to love the light and the sun after such nightmares, even when the Germans were so near, and that with the dawn we knew the sing-song of the cannons would start again. I could have yelled with joy at the first signs of daylight: _An English Interpreter_.
Some plucky things have been done by chauffeurs and motor-lorry drivers. It would make some of your London drivers stare to see what they will risk. One of them said this war will cause a revolution in motor driving, as, till now, they never had a chance of seeing what a heavy motor-van could do off a macadamized road. They simply go whereever there is room for them, and more than once they have charged patrol parties who tried to capture them, and got through all right. One driver, seeing that the road was blocked, charged a wooden fence and turf wall, and got out of the way of a lorry that the Germans sent at full speed to smash him. The smashing was on the German lorry. Motorcycles also do wonders. They travel like demons, and rarely get hit: _Pte. Watts, Cheshire Regiment_.