Malice toward None
After days of vicious fighting the American paratroopers brought in a wounded German soldier to their company commander. He had lain out all night in subzero weather with a severe wound in his leg from a .50 caliber bullet. Both of his arms and legs were frozen, and he was begging to be shot. The company commander later recalled:
I couldn’t do it. I asked for a volunteer. Even if he survived, he’d have to have both arms and legs amputated, and this could have been a mercy killing. But these battle hardened soldiers that had been fighting Germans a few minutes before would not volunteer. One soldier, out of sympathy for the suffering and bravery of this soldier, lit a cigarette and held it to his lips. Another soldier brought him a hot cup of coffee and held it so he could get coffee until we got the litter jeep up there and sent him to the rear.472
On another battlefield a British lieutenant described the attitude of his men toward enemy prisoners immediately after an intense battle: “We treated them very kindly, bringing in their wounded and giving them cigarettes. It is strange, but we are very poor haters.”473
These Allied soldiers exemplified the Christian moral code for the merciful treatment of a defeated enemy articulated eighty years earlier by a great American president: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right…”474 Fortunately for us, mercy is an attribute of God himself, and he fully expects us to show this quality toward others, even in the heat of conflict.
My judgments flashed like lightning upon you. For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings.
—Hosea 6:56