ady who has been more
than one hundred days nursing the wounded from the battle-line, and
she, singular as it may appear, assisted on both sides of that
battle-line. She assisted to dress the wounds of French soldiers where
the lacerations of shrapnel had broken one entire side of a human
system, face, eye, ear, jaw, arm, leg; yet that soldier lived. She
dressed wounds where more than twenty bullets pierced a single human
frame. Yet that soldier will go back to the front. French boys in
their 'teens had died in her arms at the hospital,--the hospital where
thousands of wounded pass through every month,--and she had taken back
to the parents in Paris the dying message. She had been in the German
and the French trenches on the line of battle. She had crossed the
lines and been under arrest. She had seen the horrible picture of
freight-loads of German corpses on German railroads,--corpses
unhelmeted, with uncovered faces, but in boots and uniform, tied like
cordwood in bunches of three and standing upright on their way to the
lime-kilns. She had nursed the wounded German soldier in his delirium,
crying in German, which she well understood, over the horrors which
still pursued him as he remembered the face of the wife and saw the
agony of the children as he stood in line and by direction of his
superior officer shot the husband dead. He moaned in his delirium over
the picture. The faces of the wife and children haunted him, but he
cried out that his superior officer had ordered him to do it; and she
said, "No, these people are not responsible; the dogs of war have
driven them as sheep into the slaughter-pens. They are beaten, but
fight for the Fatherland. It is their duty and they obey."

And how has it all come about? Simply thus: The Saxon was a Saxon, the
Bavarian was a Bavarian; each suddenly found himself a German and part
of a world-power. Bismarck and Von Moltke had a policy for the
Hohenzollerns; it was a united Germany, and they left it a defensive
Germany.

There was not in the brain of Bismarck or of Von Moltke, or of the
Emperor under whom they prosecuted the wars against Austria, Denmark,
and France, any idea of Germany as the Conqueror of the world.

"Never be at enmity with the Russian Bear," was the saying at the time
of Bismarck and before. "Always contrive that yours shall be a
defensive war; let the other party attack," was the declaration of
Bismarck.

The policy of Bismarck was: "If