Stories about enmity usually end the same way in real life: with walls, grudges and a long memory for every wrong. The two stories below end differently. In each one, an enemy suddenly becomes a person, and once that happens hatred cannot survive for long. Jesus put it bluntly: "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" (Matthew 5:44). These two illustrations show what that command can look like when it is no longer theory.
Both stories are retold in full in our own words, with a takeaway for preaching or reflection after each one. The first comes from one of the greatest war novels ever written. The second comes from a bombing in Israel and a car ride that turned a stranger into family.
Stories in this post:
Enemies No More: The Soldier in the Shell Hole
Erich Maria Remarque's novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) is set in the trenches of the First World War. Remarque had served as a German soldier himself, and the book follows a young German volunteer named Paul Bäumer. If you want to know more about the novel as a whole, Sopranu has written a thorough analysis of All Quiet on the Western Front. One scene from it has become a classic sermon illustration about enmity.
During an attack, Paul is caught out in no man's land and throws himself into a crater blasted out by artillery shells. He lies there alone, terrified, while the battle rages above him. Then an enemy soldier, a Frenchman, tumbles into the same shell hole. In panic Paul strikes out at him with his knife, and the man falls, badly wounded.
What follows is the heart of the story. The two men are trapped together in the crater for hours. Paul cannot leave because of the gunfire overhead, and the man he has wounded is slowly dying beside him. Paul's fear turns to horror and then to pity. He crawls across, gives the dying man water from his canteen and tries to bandage his wounds. He listens to the man's gurgling breath and can hardly bear it.
When the Frenchman finally dies, Paul goes through his pockets and finds his wallet. Inside are letters and photographs: a picture of a woman and a little girl, the dead man's wife and daughter. The man has a name, Gérard Duval. He was a printer. Paul speaks to the dead body, telling him that he never wanted to kill him, that if they could only have met somewhere else they might have been friends. He promises to write to the man's wife. In that shell hole the soldier stops being "the enemy" and becomes a father, a husband, someone who loved and was loved. Someone just like Paul.
Many sermon versions of this story soften the details, saying the German soldier simply came across a wounded man and comforted him as he talked about his family. In Remarque's novel the truth is harder: Paul himself struck the blow, and only afterwards did he see who he had wounded. That makes the moment even more powerful. It is not just kindness to a stranger. It is the shock of discovering the human face of the person you were told to hate.
This is always the path of peace and reconciliation: learning to truly see the other person, and recognising in them someone just like yourself.
Takeaway: Enmity depends on not seeing. As long as the other side is a uniform, a party or a label, it is easy to hate them. Once we see their family photographs, it becomes very hard. "If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink" (Romans 12:20). Who in your life have you reduced to a label, and what would it take to see their face instead?
Source: Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), chapter 9.
We Are All Family: The Girl in the Back Seat
A note before we begin: this story has been widely told in sermons, but we have not been able to confirm its details from an independent news source. We share it as an illustration, not as verified history.
The story goes that the journalist Peter Arnett, later famous as a CNN war correspondent, was on assignment in Israel when a bomb exploded nearby. Through the chaos and the crowds of wounded people came a man carrying a little girl in his arms. She had been badly hurt by the blast.
The man begged Arnett to help him get her to a hospital. Police had already thrown a security cordon around the area, and as a member of the press Arnett was one of the few people able to get through it. He agreed at once. He bundled the man and the little girl into his car and drove as fast as he could. The journey was traumatic. Neither of them knew whether the beautiful little girl would survive.
They made it to the hospital and rushed her inside. Then came the waiting. After what felt like an eternity, a doctor came out with the news they had dreaded. The little girl had died.
The man collapsed in tears. Arnett stumbled for something to say. "I don't know what to say," he told him. "I can't imagine what you must be going through. I've never lost a child."
The man turned and looked at him. "That girl was not my daughter," he said. "I'm an Israeli settler. She was a Palestinian. But there comes a time when each of us must realise that every child, whatever that child's background, is a daughter or a son. There must come a time when we realise that we are all family."
Takeaway: In one of the most bitter conflicts on earth, a man from one side carried a child from the other side as if she were his own, and wept for her as a father. Enmity says "them and us." Grace says "we." Paul wrote that in Christ the dividing wall of hostility has been torn down (Ephesians 2:14). Which child, or which adult, from "the other side" do you need to start seeing as family?
Source: unknown. The details of this story could not be independently verified.
Final thoughts
A German soldier staring at a photograph in a shell hole, and an Israeli settler weeping for a Palestinian girl in a hospital corridor. These stories about enmity show that hatred is usually built on distance. Close the distance, and the enemy turns out to be a person with a family, a name and a story of their own.
Loving your enemies does not mean pretending wrongs never happened. It begins with something smaller and harder: choosing to see the human being on the other side. Who is the first person you need to see differently?
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These stories are retold in our own words for teaching and reflection. Sources are credited under each story.
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