s now his wife and the very competent head of his household."

It was obvious, but both smiled.

"Hans is not so bad," said the hausfrau complacently, and John's
compliment won him an unusually good room that night. Hans told him also
that he could probably secure him a place in an empty supply wagon the
next morning, and John was grateful. Walking was good, and it had done
much to maintain his strength and steady his nerves, but one could not
walk all the way across Germany.

He was aware that he was surrounded by dangers but he felt that the
omens remained fair. Perhaps the good wishes that had been given to him
still clothed him about and protected him from harm. In abnormal times
the human mind seeks more than an ordinary faith.

He would have slept well, but in the night an army passed. For hours and
hours the gray legions trod by in numbers past counting, the moonlight
casting gleams upon the spiked helmets. Then came masses of Uhlans and
hussars and after them batteries of great guns and scores and scores of
the wicked machine guns. Truly, as the priest had said, the whole world
had gone mad. He remembered those days in Vienna when the gay and
light-head ed Viennese had marched up and down the streets all night
long, singing and dancing, and thinking only of war as a festival, in
which glorious victory was sure and quick. Torrents of blood had flowed
under the bridges since then, gay Austria, that had set the torch, had
been shaken to its foundation, and no victory was yet in sight for
anybody.

Nevertheless the German legions seemed inexhaustible. John had seen them
turned back in those long days of fighting on the Marne, and more than a
million had been killed or wounded since the war began, but that
avalanche of men and guns still poured out of the heart of Germany. He
felt more deeply than ever that the world could not afford a German
victory, and the sanguinary spectacle of a Kaiser riding roughshod over
civilization. The fact that so many German people were likable and that
Germany had achieved so much made the case all the worse.

He took the road the next morning, not on foot this time but in an empty
provision wagon, returning eastward, drawn by two powerful horses and
driven by Fritz, a stout German youth. Both Hans and the hausfrau wished
him well, and he soon made a friend of Fritz, who was a Bavarian from a
little village near Munich. John knew Munich better than any other
German city, and he a