aternal basis for living with them? Can they ever be
made to become like other people? These questions kept surging
through his mind as he hurried along.

When Holland was reached that morning, his passport was declared
impeccable and his faithful trunk caused him no trouble. Although
the war excitement was seizing that region he fortunately met no
delay in getting to the coast. Once out of Deutschland he felt
amazingly well despite the weariness of his exhausting night. He
concluded that the vigorous exercise and sweating he had been
through had steamed out of him the vileness he had found in Germany.
It acted like a rejuvenating process. Gard now seemed to himself
like a clean, new man. He _was_ to be a new man.

CHAPTER XLII

THE ANTI-CHRISTIANS?

In England, when war came, the confusion was unbelievable. All that
Gard had seen, heard, gone through in Deutschland proved the
awfulness of the Force flung against Europe which had stupidly
considered itself civilized.

He was burning to enlist. But what a chagrin to find his services
not wanted! The only satisfaction he could get lay in the suggestion
to wait. The more he was put off, the more he was bent on reaching
the firing line.

In his enforced and impatient idleness he took out his German note
book and began writing letters to Rebner in America, thus giving
partial vent to his own feelings. The following brief extracts were
written first as he went about different camps, offering himself,
then at the front:

_England, October, 1914._

... You know how I went to Germany at your urging, with every
favorable impulse toward the Germans. But you had little idea
what they are. If our fellow-Americans realized what was thought
and said of them beyond the Rhine, they would be in battle now.

As there is no prospect of our Government wanting fighting men,
I am trying to get into the English service. No success yet....

How could you, my good mentor, be so in error about the race
from which you sprang? Had you been in Germany, the scales would
have dropped from your eyes. You have never lived with the
Germans there--only read the best about the "most advanced" of
mankind. They are so different from our American-Germans. You
did not know that the educated Teuton at home is apt to be dirty
in his person and habits, eats with his knife, walks before
women, kicks his children about, has coarse or