There’s a piece in the Guardian (via Blog on the Run) that features an interview with a 107-year old veteran of WWI.  You can read the whole thing here, but here’s an excerpt:

We got as far as their
second line and four Germans stood up. They didn’t get up to run away,
they got up to fight. One of them came running towards me. He couldn’t
have had any ammunition or he would have shot me, but he came towards
me with his bayonet pointing at my chest. I fired and hit him in the
shoulder. He dropped his rifle, but still came stumbling on. I can only
suppose that he wanted to kick our Lewis gun into the mud, which would
have made it useless. I had three live rounds left in my revolver and
could have killed him with the first. What should I do? I had seconds
to make my mind up. I gave him his life. I didn’t kill him. I shot him
above the ankle and above the knee and brought him down. I knew he
would be picked up, passed back to a PoW camp, and at the end of the
war he would rejoin his family.

Six
weeks later, a countryman of his killed my three mates. If that had
happened before I met that German, I would have damn well killed him.
But we never fired to kill. My Number One, Bob, used to keep the gun
low and wound them in the legs – bring them down. Never fired to kill
them. As far as I know he never killed a German. I never did either.
Always kept it low…

On September 21, the
night I was wounded, the battalion had been relieved at 10 o’clock and
we were going back over open ground to the support line. The shell that
got us was what we called a whizz-bang, which burst amongst us. The
force of it threw me to the floor, but I didn’t realise I’d been hit
for a few minutes. The burning hot metal knocks the pain out of you at
first but I soon saw blood, so I put a field dressing on it. Then the
pain started.

I
didn’t know what had happened to the others at first, but I was told
later that I had lost three of my mates. That shell killed Numbers
Three, Four and Five. We were a little team together, and those men who
were carrying the ammunition were blown to pieces. I reacted very
badly. It was like losing a part of my life. It upset me more than
anything. We had only been together four months, but with hell going on
around us, it seemed like a lifetime.

I’d
got this piece of shrapnel right in the groin. It was about two inches
long, half an inch thick, with a jagged edge. I was taken to a dressing
station and I lay there all that night and the next day, until the
evening. The wound had been cleaned and they had smeared it with
something to keep the lice away. When the doctor came to see me, he
could actually see the shrapnel.

"Would
you like me to take that out of your leg?" he asked, but added quickly,
"Before you answer ‘Yes’, there’s no anaesthetic in the camp. None
whatever. It’s been used on people more badly wounded than you are.
Yours is only a scratch." So I thought for a minute or two, and said,
"How long will you be?" He said, "A couple of minutes." So I said,
"Carry on." Four fellows grabbed me – one on each arm and one on each
leg – and I can feel that bloody knife even now, cutting out that
shrapnel. When he pulled it out, the doctor asked me if I wanted to
keep the shrapnel as a souvenir. Officer or not, I swore at him, "I’ve
had the bloody thing too long already. Throw it away!"…

Last year I went back
to Ypres, where I met one of the last surviving German veterans of the
war, Charles Kuentz, who was 107. It was very emotional. We had both
been on the same battlefield at Pilckem Ridge. For a while I hadn’t
wanted to meet him, but I got a letter from him in Germany and he
seemed like a nice man and I decided I would meet him. He was a nice
man and we talked, then we both sat in silence, staring out at the
landscape. Both of us remembering the stench, the noise, the gas, the
mud crusted with blood, the cries of the fallen comrades. We had both
fought because we were told to. Sadly, he died a year after I met him.

Why
should the British government call me up and take me out to a
battlefield to shoot a man I never knew, whose language I couldn’t
speak? All those lives lost for a war finished over a table.

Now
what is the sense in that? It’s just an argument between two
governments. Neither Charles nor I ever want any other young man ever
to go through what we did again, but still we send our lads to war. In
Iraq, our young men are being killed and told to kill.

I
don’t think it is possible to truly explain the bond that is forged
between a soldier in the trenches and his fellow soldiers. There you
all are, no matter what your life in civvy street, covered in lice,
desperately hungry, eking out the small treats – the ounce of tobacco,
the biscuit. You relied on him and he on you, never really thinking
that it was just the same for the enemy. But it was. It was every bit
as bad.