working for their wives and children--"

"Natalie," said he, "you are only half a woman: you don't care about
military glory."

"It is the most mean, the most cruel and contemptible thing under the
sun!" she said, passionately. "What is the quality that makes a great
hero--a great general--nowadays? Courage? Not a bit. It is
callousness!--an absolute indifference to the slaughtering of human
lives! You sit in your tent--you sit on horseback--miles away from the
fighting; and if the poor wretches are being destroyed here or there in
too great quantities, if they are ridden down by the horses and torn to
pieces by the mitrailleuses, 'Oh, clap on another thousand or two: the
place must be taken at all risks.' Yes, indeed; but not much risk to
you! For if you fail--if all the thousands of men have been hurled
against the stone and lead only to be thrown back crushed and
murdered--why, you have fought with great courage--_you_, the great
general, sitting in your saddle miles away; it is _you_ who have shown
extraordinary courage!--but numbers were against you: and if you win,
you have shown still greater courage; and the audacity of the movement
was so and so; and your dogged persistence was so and so; and you get
another star for your breast; and all the world sings your praises. And
who is to court-martial a great hero for reckless waste of human life?
Who is to tell him that he is a cruel-hearted coward? Who is to take him
to the fields he has saturated with blood, and compel him to count the
corpses; or to take him to the homesteads he has ruined throughout the
land, and ask the women and sons and the daughters what they think of
this marvellous courage? Oh no; he is away back in the capital--there is
a triumphal procession; all we want now is another war-tax--for the
peasant must pay with his money as well as with his blood--and another
levy of the young men to be taken and killed!"

This was always a sore point with Natalie; and he did not seek to check
her enthusiasm with any commonplace and obvious criticisms. When she got
into one of these moods of proud indignation, which was not seldom, he
loved her all the more. There was something in the ring of her voice
that touched him to the heart. Such noble, quick, generous sympathy
seemed to him far too beautiful and rare a thing to be met by argument
and analysis. When he heard that pathetic tremulousness in her voice, he
was ready to believe anything. When he looked a