Sixteen bewildered Frenchmen who had got
separated from their company came straggling through a little forest and
walked right into them. The Frenchmen thought the cook wagon with its
short smoke funnel and its steel fire box was a new kind of machine gun,
and they threw down their guns and surrendered. The two cooks brought
their sixteen prisoners back to our lines too, but first one of them
stood guard over the Frenchmen while the other carried the breakfast
coffee to the men who had been all night in the trenches. They are good
men, those cooks!"
So at last I found out at second hand what one German soldier had done
to merit the bestowal of the Iron Cross. But as we came away, I was in
doubt on a certain point and, for that matter, am still in doubt on it:
I am in doubt as to which of two men most fitly typified the spirit of
the German Army in this war--the general feeding his men by thousands
into the maw of destruction because it was an order, or the
pot-wrestling private soldier, the camp cook, going to death with a
coffee boiler in his hands--because it was an order.
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