g ruin.

Our American ambulances from Neuilly were already arriving--the
_pompiers_ came later--and the police lines were being drawn. A civilian
spectator, even though a captain of the Red Cross, could render no real
assistance; so much, after certain futile efforts on my part, was made
clear to me, profanely, in a Middle Western accent, by a young
stretcher-bearer whose course I had clumsily impeded. Clouds of
lung-choking dust, milk-white as the moon's full rays played upon them,
rolled over us--the subdued crowd that gathered slowly, oblivious of
further danger. The air was full of whispered rumor--throughout Paris
hundreds--thousands, said some--had already died. We were keyed to
believe the wildest exaggerations, to accept the worst that excited
imaginations could invent for us. Yet there was no panic; no one gave
way to hysterical outcry; and the fall of more distant bombs brought
only a deep common groan, compounded of growling imprecations--a groan
truly of defiance and loathing, into which neither fear nor pity for the
victims of this frightfulness could find room to enter. I cursed with
the rest, instinctively, from the pit of my stomach, and turned raging
away; my whole being ached, was congested with rage. For the first time
in my life I then felt in its full hell-born fury that passion so often
named, but so seldom experienced by civilized--or what we call
civilized--man: the passion of _hate_.

By the time I had reached the hospital the raid was over; the air was
droning from the bronze vibrations of hundreds of bells, all the
church-bells of Paris, full-throated, calling forth their immediate
surface messages of cheer, their deeper message of courage and
constancy.

Though it was very late, I found a silent group of four nurses standing
in the heavily shadowed street before the shut doors of this small
civilian hospital; they were still staring up fixedly at the
silver-bright sky. They proved to be day-nurses off duty, and among them
was Mademoiselle Annette. She greeted me now as an old friend, and
brushing rules and regulations aside like a true Frenchwoman took me at
once to Susan. I found that Susan had risen from bed and was seated at
her window, which looked out across the winter-bare hospital garden.

"Ambo," she exclaimed impatiently, "why did you come here! I'm so used
to all this. But Jeanne-Marie, Ambo--in her condition! I've been hoping
so you would think of her--go to her!"

Then what