Spanish Prisoners of War | Page 8

prisoners' rations and lodgings, and
our officer ironically professed his intention of messing with the
Spanish officers. But there was no grudge, and not a shadow of ill will,
or of that stupid and atrocious hate towards the public enemy which
abominable newspapers and politicians had tried to breed in the popular
mind. There was nothing manifest but a sort of cheerful purpose to live
up to that military ideal of duty which is so much nobler than the civil
ideal of self-interest. Perhaps duty will yet become the civil ideal, when
the peoples shall have learned to live for the common good, and are
united for the operation of the industries as they now are for the
hostilities.

IV.
Shall I say that a sense of something domestic, something homelike,
imparted itself from what I had seen? Or was this more properly an
effect from our visit, on the way back to the hospital, where a hundred
and fifty of the prisoners lay sick of wounds and fevers? I cannot say
that a humaner spirit prevailed here than in the camp; it was only a
more positive humanity which was at work. Most of the sufferers were
stretched on the clean cots of two long, airy, wooden shells, which
received them, four days after the orders for their reception had come,
with every equipment for their comfort. At five o'clock, when we
passed down the aisles between their beds, many of them had a gay,
nonchalant effect of having toothpicks or cigarettes in their mouths; but
it was really the thermometers with which the nurses were taking their
temperature. It suggested a possibility to me, however, and I asked if
they were allowed to smoke, and being answered that they did smoke,
anyway, whenever they could, I got rid at last of those boxes of
cigarettes which had been burning my pockets, as it were, all afternoon.
I gave them to such as I was told were the most deserving among the

sick captives, but Heaven knows I would as willingly have given them
to the least. They took my largesse gravely, as became Spaniards; one
said, smiling sadly, "Muchas gracias," but the others merely smiled
sadly; and I looked in vain for the response which would have twinkled
up in the faces of even moribund Italians at our looks of pity. Italians
would have met our sympathy halfway; but these poor fellows were of
another tradition, and in fact not all the Latin peoples are the same,
though we sometimes conveniently group them together for our
detestation. Perhaps there are even personal distinctions among their
several nationalities, and there are some Spaniards who are as true and
kind as some Americans. When we remember Cortez let us not forget
Las Casas.
They lay in their beds there, these little Spanish men, whose dark faces
their sickness could not blanch to more than a sickly sallow, and as
they turned their dull black eyes upon us I must own that I could not
"support the government" so fiercely as I might have done elsewhere.
But the truth is, I was demoralized by the looks of these poor little men,
who, in spite of their character of public enemies, did look so much like
somebody's brothers, and even somebody's children. I may have been
infected by the air of compassion, of scientific compassion, which
prevailed in the place. There it was as wholly business to be kind and to
cure as in another branch of the service it was business to be cruel and
to kill. How droll these things are! The surgeons had their favorites
among the patients, to all of whom they were equally devoted;
inarticulate friendships had sprung up between them and certain of their
hapless foes, whom they spoke of as "a sort of pets." One of these was
very useful in making the mutinous take their medicine; another was
liked apparently because he was so likable. At a certain cot the chief
surgeon stopped and said, "We did not expect this boy to live through
the night." He took the boy's wrist between his thumb and finger, and
asked tenderly as he leaned over him, "Poco mejor?" The boy could not
speak to say that he was a little better; he tried to smile--such things do
move the witness; nor does the sight of a man whose bandaged cheek
has been half chopped away by a machete tend to restore one's
composure.

End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Spanish Prisoners of War, by

William Dean Howells

Spanish Prisoners of War

from http://www.dertz.in/