Why U.S. GIs Were Ordered NEVER to Pick Up a German Luger

The farmhouse was empty. The fighting had moved on, and there, on the table, in a shaft of light through the broken shutters, sat a German Luger. >>  >> Untouched. Perfect. The most wanted object in the whole European theater, just lying there, waiting to be picked up. >>  >> Every instinct in a tired soldier said, “Reach for it.

” Every order he had been given said, “Do not.” Because by the winter of 1944, the American infantryman had  learned something about the beautiful pistol left out in plain sight. He had learned it from the bulletins passed down the line. He had learned it from the friends he buried. The easier the trophy was to grab, the more likely it was to be the last thing he ever touched.

This is the story of how the most coveted prize of the war became a death  sentence, and why the men who survived learned never to reach for it. To understand the danger, you have to understand the hunger. By 1944, the American soldier had turned collecting into something close to an obsession. There was a saying that traced back to the last war.

The English fought for honor, the French fought for glory, and the Americans fought for souvenirs. It was a joke. It was also true. A man wanted proof, something to carry out of the mud and the cold and the noise, something to lay on a kitchen table back home and say, “I was there.” Flags, daggers, Iron Crosses, watches pulled from the wrists of the dead, belt buckles reading “God is with us.

” But above all of it, at the very top of every soldier’s list, sat one object. The Luger. Officially, the Germans called it the Pistole 08, adopted back in 1908, chambered for the 9-mm Parabellum round. You would know it anywhere. That long, raked barrel. That strange  toggle on top that hinged and snapped like a knuckle every time it fired instead of sliding like an ordinary pistol.

Nothing else in the world looked like it. Nothing else said German quite the way it did. Here’s the irony. By the time the Americans landed in Normandy, the Luger was already old. The German army had officially replaced it years earlier with the Walther P38, a cheaper, simpler, tougher gun. The last military Lugers had rolled off the line by late 1943.

But none of that mattered to the man crossing a field in France. The Walther was the future. The Luger was the trophy. Ask any veteran of the European campaign what the most prized souvenir was, one historian wrote, and the answer came back the same every time. A Luger. There was money in it, too. Behind the lines, a small economy had grown up around German gear, and everyone knew the rates.

A Luger could fetch $100 from a rear-echelon man who wanted the story without the risk.  That was more than a month’s pay for a private. Sergeant Bill Mauldin of the 45th Infantry Division, the cartoonist who drew the war the way the infantry  actually lived it, turned the whole trade into a joke about a captured German rattling off a price list.

Camera, so much. Iron Cross, so much. Luger, top dollar. “It is good,” the prisoner says, “to be captured by Americans. The soldiers wanted them.” The Germans knew they wanted them, and that knowledge was about to be turned into a weapon. The men who turned it into a weapon were not front-line riflemen.

They were engineers.  The German army called them Pioniere. And in the retreat, they were among the most dangerous soldiers on the continent. As the Wehrmacht was driven back across France in the summer and autumn of 1944, its engineers ran the withdrawal like a grim piece of clockwork. They cratered the roads.

They dropped the bridges into the rivers. And behind them, in the ground and in the houses, and in the abandoned equipment. They left thousands of small deaths waiting to be triggered. The Germans had a word for it. A spring foul. An explosive trap. This was not cruelty invented on the spot by frightened men. It was doctrine, written down and taught.

A captured German order from the autumn of 1943, issued under General Heidrich of the first parachute division, and later reprinted in American intelligence reports, laid it out coldly. The setting of booby traps, the wide use of every kind of obstruction. Debris piled to block a road, Allied analysts noted, had often been mined to a depth of 30 yards, so that the men who came to clear it died clearing it.

And they had the tools for it. The most feared was a device the Americans came to call the bouncing betty. The Germans called it the shrapnel mine. Step on the three little prongs or snag the wire, and it did not simply explode at your feet. A small charge threw it up out of the ground first to about the height of a man’s belt, then it burst and hurled some 360 steel balls in every direction at once.

It was built not to kill one man, but to cut down everyone standing near him. And the engineers would daisy-chain them, wiring several together so that one wrong step set off a whole cluster. Now, put those two facts side by side. An enemy who booby-trapped everything as a matter of training. And an American soldier who could not resist a souvenir.

The first proof came before the Americans ever reached France. In October of 1943, the Germans pulled out of Naples in southern Italy and left the city rigged behind them. Delayed action mines and hidden charges kept detonating for weeks after the last German had gone. Buildings collapsed  on the people who had survived the fighting.

It was a warning written in rubble, and the message was plain. The Germans would keep killing you long after they had left the ground. By the time the Americans were fighting their way across France, the danger was no longer a rumor passed between  veterans. It was official. The Army published something called the Intelligence Bulletin, put out by the Military Intelligence Service, and it spelled  the threat out in flat unglamorous language.

As early as October of 1943,  it had already told soldiers the truth about their favorite hobby. “Souvenir hunting,” it said, “kept causing needless loss of American lives.” And then the line that mattered, “The enemy  will booby trap the very things he knows you want to take.” The bulletins read like a catalog  of ordinary objects turned lethal.

A helmet lying in a field,  propped over a charge, wired so that lifting it fired the igniter. An oven door in an abandoned kitchen connected to an anti-tank mine, so that a hungry soldier looking for a warm place to cook died where he stood. A field telephone, a gate, a fence post, a pile of rubbish with something valuable resting on top of it, something worth stopping for, wired to a pull igniter underneath.

And then, in February of 1945, the bulletin named the trophy itself. It described a charge concealed inside the mechanism of a rifle or a Luger pistol left in plain view, exactly where a curious man would spot it. Squeeze the trigger to admire the action the way anyone handling a fine pistol naturally  would, and the charge fired.

Understand what that meant. The Army was not warning its men about a weapon the Germans were shooting at them. It was warning them about their own desire, about the reflex to reach out and pick up the beautiful thing. The Germans had found a way to make a soldier’s own hand the trigger. The proof came on the beaches.

On the 6th  of June, 1944, a combat engineer named Joseph Motil came ashore at Utah Beach on the Normandy coast carrying blocks of TNT  to blow the obstacles the Germans had planted in the sand. Motil lived through the landing. He remembered watching another man not live through the hours after it.

In the chaos of that first day,  a soldier spotted a German Luger, the prize right there for the taking. He reached for it. Whatever the Germans had rigged to it did the rest. The engineer who had crossed an ocean and a fire-swept beach survived. The man who stopped for the souvenir did not. Before we walk into what came next, if you want more of the war told this way, the tactics  and the honest truth underneath the legends, take a moment to subscribe.

It keeps  these stories coming. Now, the forest. By the autumn of 1944, the Americans had pushed to the German border and walked into a stretch of dark pine forest called the Huertgen, southeast of the city of Aachen. It was one of the worst places American infantry fought in the entire war.

The trees swallowed the daylight, and under the pine needles, the German engineers had been busy. They mined the trail several layers deep. Men who fought there remembered mines set every eight paces, so close together that clearing one only put your boot within reach of the next. They booby-trapped the empty foxholes, so that a tired man dropping into cover triggered the charge beneath him.

The forest itself had been turned into a single enormous trap, and it was here, in the Huertgen, that the Germans did something that went beyond any pistol on a table. Private William H. Edwards belonged to the 4th Infantry Division, the Ivy Division, the same outfit that had led the way onto Utah Beach on D-Day.

Edwards was a married man, a father of six children waiting for him at home. On a night patrol in that black forest, he was hit and went down wounded, cut off from his own lines. The Germans found him before  his friends could. They did not finish him. They did something colder. They slid a demolition  charge underneath his body as he lay there, and then they ran a web of thin wires out from it and around him so that the charge was tied to his own weight and every movement.

Any man who tried to drag  him to safety, any shift of his body in any direction would set it off. They turned a wounded American into bait, and they turned the act of saving him into a way to kill his rescuers. Edwards lay there, awake in the cold, wired to a bomb for the better part of 70 hours. 3 days and 3 nights, unable to move, knowing the men who loved him could not come for him without dying with him.

When help finally reached him, two soldiers worked their way in and cut the wires one at a time by hand until they could pull him free. He lived. The story is recorded in his own division’s official history. >>  >> Edwards is the one we know because he survived. Most of the men the Germans caught this way did not, and the record we have of them is often a single photograph.

On the 12th of  December, 1944, an Army Signal Corps cameraman,  Staff Sergeant Dwight Ellett, photographed a cellar in the German village of Yungersdorf. In the frame is the body of a dead German soldier >>  >> laid out in the basement of a building in the 9th Infantry Division sector. The caption, >>  >> written by the Army at the time, is as plain as a coroner’s note.

The dead man had been rigged trap and left behind by his own retreating comrades  with the explosive sitting visible right beside the body. To move him, to search him, to give him a decent burial, any of it could kill you. Even their own dead had been turned into weapons. And still the soldiers reached.

That is the part that is hardest to explain to anyone who was not there. They knew. They had read the bulletins, heard the stories, buried the friends, and they reached anyway. A D-Day veteran, Sergeant Ivan Schwartz, caught it exactly. He saw a German pistol, wanted it, weighed the risk in a single heartbeat, and thought, in his own words, “Booby traps or no booby traps, here goes.

” He was lucky. What he grabbed was a Walther, not a wired trap, and he carried it for the rest of the war. Now for the hardest part of the story, the part where honesty matters more than drama. If you have heard this tale before, you have probably heard a very particular version of it.

A pristine Luger resting on a table in an empty farmhouse, or laid carefully on the chest of a dead German officer. A wire running from the trigger guard down through the floorboards to a bouncing betty. A soldier grabs the prize, and the  blast kills his entire squad. It is a perfect story. It is cinematic, and it is terrible.

And it has been told at reunions and around campfires for 80 years. Here is what the records actually support, and it matters that we get this right. The warning was real. The army printed it. German engineers absolutely did conceal charges inside weapons, and they absolutely  did booby trap corpses and abandoned gear and tempting objects left in plain sight.

All of that is documented in the bulletins, in the photographs, in the after-action reports. That part is not legend, it is history. But the specific scene, the untouched Luger on the table wired to a floor mine that erases a whole squad, is far harder to pin to any  single verified incident with names and a date.

The gun the bulletin describes had the charge inside  it, fired by the trigger, powerful enough to maim the man holding it, not to level a room. The version with the hidden floor mine and the wiped-out squad lives mostly in memory and in the retelling, growing a little with each pass. And here is the strange truth.

It did not matter whether every story was literally accurate. The fear did the work. The wire did not have to. Men learned to leave the easy trophy alone. Some who wanted a pistol badly enough would hook a length of wire through the trigger guard from a safe distance,  lie down behind cover, and yank it just in case.

The rumor of the booby-trapped Luger protected more men than any real booby-trapped Luger ever killed. The legend became its own kind of armor. So, how many men did these traps actually kill? Fewer than you might think, and that is the final twist. Historians who have studied the numbers put booby traps at only around two in  every thousand American dead and roughly five in every thousand of the wounded.

As a pure killing tool, they were almost a rounding error against the machine guns and the artillery and the mines sown in open fields. Their real weapon was not the charge. It was the doubt. Every abandoned house became a question. Every helmet in a ditch, every wine bottle on a shelf, every dead man’s holster, every gleaming pistol, all of it had to be treated as a possible grave.

That hesitation, spread across an entire army, cost time and nerve on a scale no casualty count could measure. A single wired Luger that killed no one still slowed a hundred men who wondered about it. And it is worth being clear about who did this and why. These were not rogue acts. The Pioniere who rigged these traps were skilled professional soldiers carrying out written doctrine.

But that same doctrine, that same cold efficiency, belonged to an army that also mined the homes of civilians and left cities like Naples to bleed for weeks after it was gone. The skill was real. So was the system it served. Respecting one does not mean forgiving the other. The last German Lugers had left the factory before the war in Europe was even half over, and yet they kept killing and kept being carried home long after the guns fell silent.

Tens of thousands of them made the trip back across the Atlantic in duffel bags tucked next to socks and letters carried by men who had wanted them so badly they were willing to gamble their lives to get them. Many are still out there in attics and gun cabinets and on mantelpieces handed down from a grandfather who never said much about the war.

And every so often, even now, one of those old bring-back trophies turns out to still have something live inside it, which brings us back to that table in the empty farmhouse. The pistol resting in the light. Beautiful. Waiting. Exactly where a tired soldier would see it and want it.

The rule the men passed to one another never had to be written down. If a trophy looks too easy to grab, it is not a trophy. It is a question, and the wrong answer cost a man his hand or his life or the lives of the men standing beside him. The most wanted object of the war, and the last thing a careful man would ever reach for.

Why U.S. GIs Were Ordered NEVER to Pick Up a German Luger

The farmhouse was empty. The fighting had moved on, and there, on the table, in a shaft of light through the broken shutters, sat a German Luger. >>  >> Untouched. Perfect. The most wanted object in the whole European theater, just lying there, waiting to be picked up. >>  >> Every instinct in a tired soldier said, “Reach for it.

” Every order he had been given said, “Do not.” Because by the winter of 1944, the American infantryman had  learned something about the beautiful pistol left out in plain sight. He had learned it from the bulletins passed down the line. He had learned it from the friends he buried. The easier the trophy was to grab, the more likely it was to be the last thing he ever touched.

This is the story of how the most coveted prize of the war became a death  sentence, and why the men who survived learned never to reach for it. To understand the danger, you have to understand the hunger. By 1944, the American soldier had turned collecting into something close to an obsession. There was a saying that traced back to the last war.

The English fought for honor, the French fought for glory, and the Americans fought for souvenirs. It was a joke. It was also true. A man wanted proof, something to carry out of the mud and the cold and the noise, something to lay on a kitchen table back home and say, “I was there.” Flags, daggers, Iron Crosses, watches pulled from the wrists of the dead, belt buckles reading “God is with us.

” But above all of it, at the very top of every soldier’s list, sat one object. The Luger. Officially, the Germans called it the Pistole 08, adopted back in 1908, chambered for the 9-mm Parabellum round. You would know it anywhere. That long, raked barrel. That strange  toggle on top that hinged and snapped like a knuckle every time it fired instead of sliding like an ordinary pistol.

Nothing else in the world looked like it. Nothing else said German quite the way it did. Here’s the irony. By the time the Americans landed in Normandy, the Luger was already old. The German army had officially replaced it years earlier with the Walther P38, a cheaper, simpler, tougher gun. The last military Lugers had rolled off the line by late 1943.

But none of that mattered to the man crossing a field in France. The Walther was the future. The Luger was the trophy. Ask any veteran of the European campaign what the most prized souvenir was, one historian wrote, and the answer came back the same every time. A Luger. There was money in it, too. Behind the lines, a small economy had grown up around German gear, and everyone knew the rates.

A Luger could fetch $100 from a rear-echelon man who wanted the story without the risk.  That was more than a month’s pay for a private. Sergeant Bill Mauldin of the 45th Infantry Division, the cartoonist who drew the war the way the infantry  actually lived it, turned the whole trade into a joke about a captured German rattling off a price list.

Camera, so much. Iron Cross, so much. Luger, top dollar. “It is good,” the prisoner says, “to be captured by Americans. The soldiers wanted them.” The Germans knew they wanted them, and that knowledge was about to be turned into a weapon. The men who turned it into a weapon were not front-line riflemen.

They were engineers.  The German army called them Pioniere. And in the retreat, they were among the most dangerous soldiers on the continent. As the Wehrmacht was driven back across France in the summer and autumn of 1944, its engineers ran the withdrawal like a grim piece of clockwork. They cratered the roads.

They dropped the bridges into the rivers. And behind them, in the ground and in the houses, and in the abandoned equipment. They left thousands of small deaths waiting to be triggered. The Germans had a word for it. A spring foul. An explosive trap. This was not cruelty invented on the spot by frightened men. It was doctrine, written down and taught.

A captured German order from the autumn of 1943, issued under General Heidrich of the first parachute division, and later reprinted in American intelligence reports, laid it out coldly. The setting of booby traps, the wide use of every kind of obstruction. Debris piled to block a road, Allied analysts noted, had often been mined to a depth of 30 yards, so that the men who came to clear it died clearing it.

And they had the tools for it. The most feared was a device the Americans came to call the bouncing betty. The Germans called it the shrapnel mine. Step on the three little prongs or snag the wire, and it did not simply explode at your feet. A small charge threw it up out of the ground first to about the height of a man’s belt, then it burst and hurled some 360 steel balls in every direction at once.

It was built not to kill one man, but to cut down everyone standing near him. And the engineers would daisy-chain them, wiring several together so that one wrong step set off a whole cluster. Now, put those two facts side by side. An enemy who booby-trapped everything as a matter of training. And an American soldier who could not resist a souvenir.

The first proof came before the Americans ever reached France. In October of 1943, the Germans pulled out of Naples in southern Italy and left the city rigged behind them. Delayed action mines and hidden charges kept detonating for weeks after the last German had gone. Buildings collapsed  on the people who had survived the fighting.

It was a warning written in rubble, and the message was plain. The Germans would keep killing you long after they had left the ground. By the time the Americans were fighting their way across France, the danger was no longer a rumor passed between  veterans. It was official. The Army published something called the Intelligence Bulletin, put out by the Military Intelligence Service, and it spelled  the threat out in flat unglamorous language.

As early as October of 1943,  it had already told soldiers the truth about their favorite hobby. “Souvenir hunting,” it said, “kept causing needless loss of American lives.” And then the line that mattered, “The enemy  will booby trap the very things he knows you want to take.” The bulletins read like a catalog  of ordinary objects turned lethal.

A helmet lying in a field,  propped over a charge, wired so that lifting it fired the igniter. An oven door in an abandoned kitchen connected to an anti-tank mine, so that a hungry soldier looking for a warm place to cook died where he stood. A field telephone, a gate, a fence post, a pile of rubbish with something valuable resting on top of it, something worth stopping for, wired to a pull igniter underneath.

And then, in February of 1945, the bulletin named the trophy itself. It described a charge concealed inside the mechanism of a rifle or a Luger pistol left in plain view, exactly where a curious man would spot it. Squeeze the trigger to admire the action the way anyone handling a fine pistol naturally  would, and the charge fired.

Understand what that meant. The Army was not warning its men about a weapon the Germans were shooting at them. It was warning them about their own desire, about the reflex to reach out and pick up the beautiful thing. The Germans had found a way to make a soldier’s own hand the trigger. The proof came on the beaches.

On the 6th  of June, 1944, a combat engineer named Joseph Motil came ashore at Utah Beach on the Normandy coast carrying blocks of TNT  to blow the obstacles the Germans had planted in the sand. Motil lived through the landing. He remembered watching another man not live through the hours after it.

In the chaos of that first day,  a soldier spotted a German Luger, the prize right there for the taking. He reached for it. Whatever the Germans had rigged to it did the rest. The engineer who had crossed an ocean and a fire-swept beach survived. The man who stopped for the souvenir did not. Before we walk into what came next, if you want more of the war told this way, the tactics  and the honest truth underneath the legends, take a moment to subscribe.

It keeps  these stories coming. Now, the forest. By the autumn of 1944, the Americans had pushed to the German border and walked into a stretch of dark pine forest called the Huertgen, southeast of the city of Aachen. It was one of the worst places American infantry fought in the entire war.

The trees swallowed the daylight, and under the pine needles, the German engineers had been busy. They mined the trail several layers deep. Men who fought there remembered mines set every eight paces, so close together that clearing one only put your boot within reach of the next. They booby-trapped the empty foxholes, so that a tired man dropping into cover triggered the charge beneath him.

The forest itself had been turned into a single enormous trap, and it was here, in the Huertgen, that the Germans did something that went beyond any pistol on a table. Private William H. Edwards belonged to the 4th Infantry Division, the Ivy Division, the same outfit that had led the way onto Utah Beach on D-Day.

Edwards was a married man, a father of six children waiting for him at home. On a night patrol in that black forest, he was hit and went down wounded, cut off from his own lines. The Germans found him before  his friends could. They did not finish him. They did something colder. They slid a demolition  charge underneath his body as he lay there, and then they ran a web of thin wires out from it and around him so that the charge was tied to his own weight and every movement.

Any man who tried to drag  him to safety, any shift of his body in any direction would set it off. They turned a wounded American into bait, and they turned the act of saving him into a way to kill his rescuers. Edwards lay there, awake in the cold, wired to a bomb for the better part of 70 hours. 3 days and 3 nights, unable to move, knowing the men who loved him could not come for him without dying with him.

When help finally reached him, two soldiers worked their way in and cut the wires one at a time by hand until they could pull him free. He lived. The story is recorded in his own division’s official history. >>  >> Edwards is the one we know because he survived. Most of the men the Germans caught this way did not, and the record we have of them is often a single photograph.

On the 12th of  December, 1944, an Army Signal Corps cameraman,  Staff Sergeant Dwight Ellett, photographed a cellar in the German village of Yungersdorf. In the frame is the body of a dead German soldier >>  >> laid out in the basement of a building in the 9th Infantry Division sector. The caption, >>  >> written by the Army at the time, is as plain as a coroner’s note.

The dead man had been rigged trap and left behind by his own retreating comrades  with the explosive sitting visible right beside the body. To move him, to search him, to give him a decent burial, any of it could kill you. Even their own dead had been turned into weapons. And still the soldiers reached.

That is the part that is hardest to explain to anyone who was not there. They knew. They had read the bulletins, heard the stories, buried the friends, and they reached anyway. A D-Day veteran, Sergeant Ivan Schwartz, caught it exactly. He saw a German pistol, wanted it, weighed the risk in a single heartbeat, and thought, in his own words, “Booby traps or no booby traps, here goes.

” He was lucky. What he grabbed was a Walther, not a wired trap, and he carried it for the rest of the war. Now for the hardest part of the story, the part where honesty matters more than drama. If you have heard this tale before, you have probably heard a very particular version of it.

A pristine Luger resting on a table in an empty farmhouse, or laid carefully on the chest of a dead German officer. A wire running from the trigger guard down through the floorboards to a bouncing betty. A soldier grabs the prize, and the  blast kills his entire squad. It is a perfect story. It is cinematic, and it is terrible.

And it has been told at reunions and around campfires for 80 years. Here is what the records actually support, and it matters that we get this right. The warning was real. The army printed it. German engineers absolutely did conceal charges inside weapons, and they absolutely  did booby trap corpses and abandoned gear and tempting objects left in plain sight.

All of that is documented in the bulletins, in the photographs, in the after-action reports. That part is not legend, it is history. But the specific scene, the untouched Luger on the table wired to a floor mine that erases a whole squad, is far harder to pin to any  single verified incident with names and a date.

The gun the bulletin describes had the charge inside  it, fired by the trigger, powerful enough to maim the man holding it, not to level a room. The version with the hidden floor mine and the wiped-out squad lives mostly in memory and in the retelling, growing a little with each pass. And here is the strange truth.

It did not matter whether every story was literally accurate. The fear did the work. The wire did not have to. Men learned to leave the easy trophy alone. Some who wanted a pistol badly enough would hook a length of wire through the trigger guard from a safe distance,  lie down behind cover, and yank it just in case.

The rumor of the booby-trapped Luger protected more men than any real booby-trapped Luger ever killed. The legend became its own kind of armor. So, how many men did these traps actually kill? Fewer than you might think, and that is the final twist. Historians who have studied the numbers put booby traps at only around two in  every thousand American dead and roughly five in every thousand of the wounded.

As a pure killing tool, they were almost a rounding error against the machine guns and the artillery and the mines sown in open fields. Their real weapon was not the charge. It was the doubt. Every abandoned house became a question. Every helmet in a ditch, every wine bottle on a shelf, every dead man’s holster, every gleaming pistol, all of it had to be treated as a possible grave.

That hesitation, spread across an entire army, cost time and nerve on a scale no casualty count could measure. A single wired Luger that killed no one still slowed a hundred men who wondered about it. And it is worth being clear about who did this and why. These were not rogue acts. The Pioniere who rigged these traps were skilled professional soldiers carrying out written doctrine.

But that same doctrine, that same cold efficiency, belonged to an army that also mined the homes of civilians and left cities like Naples to bleed for weeks after it was gone. The skill was real. So was the system it served. Respecting one does not mean forgiving the other. The last German Lugers had left the factory before the war in Europe was even half over, and yet they kept killing and kept being carried home long after the guns fell silent.

Tens of thousands of them made the trip back across the Atlantic in duffel bags tucked next to socks and letters carried by men who had wanted them so badly they were willing to gamble their lives to get them. Many are still out there in attics and gun cabinets and on mantelpieces handed down from a grandfather who never said much about the war.

And every so often, even now, one of those old bring-back trophies turns out to still have something live inside it, which brings us back to that table in the empty farmhouse. The pistol resting in the light. Beautiful. Waiting. Exactly where a tired soldier would see it and want it.

The rule the men passed to one another never had to be written down. If a trophy looks too easy to grab, it is not a trophy. It is a question, and the wrong answer cost a man his hand or his life or the lives of the men standing beside him. The most wanted object of the war, and the last thing a careful man would ever reach for.