to destroy microbes, insects, and beasts of prey without mercy.
The Germans themselves had proclaimed their own nature with pride.
Peaceful Belgium--invaded, burned, butchered, ravished, dismantled,
mulcted, deported, enslaved--was the first sample of German work.

Davidge had hated Germany's part in the war from the first, for the
world's sake, for the sake of the little nations trampled and starved
and the big nations thrown into desperation, and for the insolence and
omnipresence of the German menace--for the land filled with graves,
the sea with ships, the air with indiscriminate slaughter.

Now it had come straight home to himself. His own ship was assassinated;
the hill of wheat she carried had been spilled into the sterile sea.
Nearly all of her crew had been murdered or drowned. He had a
blood-feud of his own with Germany.

He was startled to find Mamise recoiling from him. He looked at her
with a sudden demand:

"Does it shock you to have me hate 'em?"

"No! No, indeed!" she cried. "I wasn't thinking of them, but of you. I
never saw you before like this. You scared me a little. I didn't know
you could be so angry."

"I'm not half as angry as I'd like to be. Don't you abominate 'em,
too?"

"Oh yes--I wish that Germany were one big ship and all the Germans on
board, and I had a torpedo big enough to blast them all to--where they
belong."

This wish seemed to him to prove a sufficient lack of affection for
the Germans, and he added, "Amen!" with a little nervous reaction into
uncouth laughter.

But this was only another form of his anguish. At such times the
distraught soul seems to have need of all its emotions and expressions,
and to run among them like a frantic child.

Davidge's next mood was a passionate regret for the crew, the dead
engineers and sailors shattered and blasted and cast into the sea, the
sufferings of the little squad that escaped into a life-boat without
water or provisions or shelter from the sun and the lashing spray.

Then he pictured the misery of hunger that the ship's cargo would have
relieved. He had been reading much of late of the Armenian--what word
or words could name that woe so multitudinous that, like the number of
the stars, the mind refused to attempt its comprehension?

He saw one of those writhing columns winding through a rocky
wilderness--old crones knocked aside to shrivel with famine, babies
withering like blistered flowers from the flattened breasts of th