, and putting hands up to his eyes as if to shut
out some awful sights, he began muttering incoherently about
"Louvain," "children screaming," "blood all over his breast,"
repeating constantly "schrecklich, schrecklich." "I don't want to see
any more war. I want to see my wife and my three children!"

"The big guns! Do you hear them?" he said.

"I don't want to hear them," he answered, shaking his head.

"They're killing you Germans by the thousands down there,"
announced Van Hee. "I should think you would want to get out and
kill the French and the English."

"I don't want to kill anybody," he repeated. "I never did want to kill
anybody. I only want to go home." As we left him he was repeating
a refrain: "I want to go home"--"Schrecklich, schrecklich." "I never
did want to kill anybody."

Every instinct in that man's soul was against the murder he had
been set to do. His conscience had been crucified. A ruthless
power had invaded his domain, dragged him from his hearthside,
placed a gun in his hands and said to him: "Kill!"

Perhaps before the war, as he had drilled along the German
roads, he had made some feeble protest. But then war seemed so
unreal and so far away; now the horror of it was in his soul.

A few days later Van Hee was obliged to return him to the German
lines. Again he was marched out to the shambles to take up the
killings against which his whole nature was in rebellion. No slave
ever went whipped to his task with greater loathing.

Once I saw slowly plodding back into Brussels a long gray line of
soldiers; the sky, too, was gray and a gray weariness had settled
down upon the spirits of these troops returning from the
destruction of a village. I was standing by the roadside holding in
my arms a refugee baby.

Its attention was caught by an officer on horseback and in baby
fashion it began waving its hand at him. Arrested by this sudden
gleam of human sunshine the stern features of the officer relaxed
into a smile. Forgetting for the moment his dignity he waved his
hand at the baby in a return salute, turning his face away from his
men that they might not see the tears in his eyes. But we could
see them.

Perhaps through those tears he saw the mirage of his own
fireside. Perhaps for the moment his homing spirit rested there,
and it was only the body from which the soul had fled that was in
the saddle here before us riding through a hostile land. Perhaps
more powerfully than the fulminatio