Now I know why all the trees change in the fall

The last blog I wrote was about people who realised that, during WW1, the Germans and the Brits weren't that different after all. They were destined to be enemies, but, as implied in Thomas Hardy's 'The Man He Killed', perhaps in other circumstances they would be close friends. Coincidentally I read a passage earlier (The Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite) that expressed these thoughts perfectly;

"He could hear their whispers and the click of their guns. He could smell their fear, their sweat, even the oil they used on their rifles. He picked one, a small man with a strange loping shuffle, and set him in his sights. And then he saw that the soldier's uniform was faintly steaming. He happened to glance down and realized that his own uniform was doing the same. The sun was drying out the rain, the mud, the recent past; they were the same, weren't they?" - The Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite, Beatrice Colin

the song is what I was listening to when I read it.