What do you think of our army now? I wonder what the Kaiser thinks about it? His famous crushing machine turns out to be an easily demoralized crowd of automatic soulless clods who don’t know the meaning of individual effort and efficiency. Take away their driving power, the fear of their brutal officers, and they stand a useless mass of brainless, bewildered men. They have a certain amount of pluck, but they don’t know how to put it to account: _A Manchester Soldier_.
German prisoners are a good deal more friendly than they were. I think they are coming to see we are not the fiends we were painted, and, besides, many of their men are sick of the whole business. All classes of society are found in the ranks as private soldiers, and one of the toughest customers I have had through my hands was a professor of music at one of the universities. He was quite young, in spite of his position, and he fought like a tiger. His hatred of us was shown in every way possible. He had lived in London for some time and knew our language well: _Sergeant T. Whelan_.
I am not at all surprised to find the Germans cracking up before the swift advance of the Allies. They gave us the impression at first that they were in too big a hurry to keep going for long at a time, but I suppose haste is part of the method of waging war. The Germans themselves are not very terrible as fighters. It is the strangeness of their methods and the up-to-date character of their appliances that count for a great deal. You do not expect to be half blinded with searchlights when marching at night, and though we get used to it soon, the horses do not, and I found that we often got into tight corners through the horses getting terrified at the glare of the light: _Trooper P. Ryan, 4th Dragoon Guards_.
Our men are easily the best troops out here, and the Germans are the “rottenest” fighters it is possible to imagine. They fight like devils when you can’t get at them, but when captured (and we have got them wholesale) they try to give one the impression they don’t want to fight, and only do so under compulsion. Our infantry are simply marvellous, especially the “Jocks” and the “Guards.” Taking things on the whole, the Germans rely almost entirely on artillery, and their shells drop like rain without doing a great amount of harm, whilst their infantry are packed like sardines in trenches, and they could not hit the town they were born in: _Pte. L. Brown, 18th Hussars_.