sing and get drunk
as much as they chose.

So the big barn that belongs to Ignacz Goldstein, the Jew, is thrown
open for a night's dancing and music and jollification. At five o'clock
in the afternoon the gipsies tuned up; there was a supper which lasted
many hours, after which the dancing began. The first csardas was struck
up at eight o'clock last evening, the last one is being danced now at
eight o'clock in the morning, while the whole plain lies in silence
under the shimmering sky, and while Pater Bonifacius reads his mass all
alone in the little church, and prays fervently for the lads who are
going away to-day for three years: away from his care and his tender,
paternal attention, away from their homes, their weeping mothers and
sorrowing sweethearts.

God bless them all! They are good lads, but weak, impulsive, easily led
toward good or evil. They are dancing now, when they should be praying,
but God bless them all! They are good lads!

CHAPTER II

"Money won't buy everything."

Inside the barn the guttering candles were burning low. No one thought
of blowing them out, so they were just left to smoke and to smoulder,
and to help render the atmosphere even more stifling than it otherwise
would have been.

The heat has become almost unbearable--unbearable, that is, to anyone
not wholly intent on pleasure to the exclusion of every other sensation,
every other consciousness. The barn built of huge pine logs,
straw-thatched and raftered, is filled to overflowing with people--men,
women, even children--all bent upon one great, all-absorbing
object--that object, forgetfulness.

The indifferent, the stolid, may call it what he will, but it is the
common wish to forget that has brought all these people--young and
old--together in Ignacz Goldstein's barn this night--the desire to
forget that hideous, fateful fourteenth of September which comes with
such heartrending regularity year after year--the desire to forget that
the lads, the flower of the neighbouring villages, are going away to-day
. . . for three years?--nay! very likely for ever!--three years! and all
packed up like cattle in a railway truck! and put under the orders of
some brutal sergeant who is not Hungarian, and can only say "Vorwaerts!"
or "Marsch!" and is backed in his arbitrary commands by the whole weight
of government, King and country.

For three years!--and there is always war going on somewhere--and that
awful Bosnia! wherever it