we would be "indulgent."

Molozov assured her that she would suffer in no kind of way, that we
must use her school for a week or so and that any loss or damage that
she incurred would of course be made up to her. She was then, of a
sudden, immensely fluent, explaining that her husband--"a most
excellent husband to me in every way one might say"--had been dead
fifteen years now, that her two sons were both fighting for the
Austrians, that she looked after the school assisted by her daughter.
These were her grandchildren.... Such a terrible year she, in all her
long life, had never remembered. She....

The arrival of the rest of the Oboz silenced her. She remained, with
wide-open staring eyes, her hand at her breast, watching, saying
absent-mindedly to the children: "Now Katya.... Now Anna.... See what
you're about!"

The school was spotlessly clean. In the schoolroom the rough benches
were marked with names and crosses. On the whitewashed walls were
coloured maps of Galicia and tables of the Austrian kings and queens;
on the blackboard still an unfinished arithmetical sum and on the
master's desk a pile of exercise books.

In a moment everything was changed; the sanitars had turned the
schoolroom into a dormitory, another room was to be our dining-room,
another a bedroom for the Sisters. In the high raftered kitchen our
midday meal was already cooking; the little cobbled court was piled
high with luggage. In the field beyond the house the sanitars had
pitched their tents.

I walked out into the little garden--a charming place with yew hedges,
a lichen-covered well and old thick apple-trees, and here I found an
old man in a broad-brimmed straw hat tending the bees. The hives were
open and he was working with a knife whilst the bees hung in a
trembling hovering cloud about him. I spoke to him but he paid no
attention to me at all. I watched him then spoke again; he
straightened himself then looked at me for a moment with eyes full of
scorn. Words of fury, of abuse perhaps, seemed to tremble on his lips,
then shaking his head he turned his back upon me and continued his
work. Behind us I could hear the soldiers breaking the garden-fence to
make stakes for their tents.

Here we were for a fortnight and it was strange to me, in the days of
stress and excitement that followed, to look back to that fortnight
and remember that we had, so many of us, been restless and
discontented at the quiet of it. Oddly enough, of all