he German Emperor, the war
microbes of Europe, cultured in the Balkan swamps, had, through some
miscalculation, after a deplorable assassination, ravaged the entire
continent instead of being localized as heretofore. Men were men and
kings were kings and war was war. Gisela sometimes wondered if the
hideous upheaval were anybody's fault, if the desire to fight had not
been more or less simultaneous in spite of the fact that Germany was
caught napping and permitted Russia and France to sneak over her
frontiers.

The sinking of the _Lusitania_ and other passenger ships, or rather the
results, had filled her with a horror that might have developed into
protest had she not been assured that the U-boats had purposely waited
for a calm sea, not too far from shore, that the passengers might have
every opportunity for escape; and that they had been the victims of
contraband cargoes of ammunition exploding, badly adjusted life-boats,
panic among themselves, and utter inefficiency and selfishness of the
officers and crew.

These excuses sounded plausible to a young woman still too occupied to
ponder; but during her journey through Belgium and the invaded districts
of France her mind grew more and more uneasy. Surely an army so
uniformly victorious, an army which only forebore to press forward in a
battle--like that of the Marne, for instance--for sound strategic
reasons, should have found it unnecessary to destroy whole towns with
their priceless monuments of art, level countless insignificant
villages, and reduce their inhabitants to cowering misery. She had been
a student of history and had inferred that modern warfare was as humane
as war may be; witness the fine magnanimity of the Japanese, an Oriental
race. This passing country, which she had known well in its hey-day,
looked extraordinarily like the historical pictures of the invasions of
Goths and Vandals and Huns.

"Huns!" She had resented the constant use of the word in the English
papers, dismissing it finally as childish spite. Had its usurpation of
the classic and noble word "Germans" been one of those quick, merciless,
simultaneous designations that fly through every army in wartime and are
as apt as they are inevitable?

She felt a sudden desire to "talk it out" with Franz von Nettelbeck,
whose mind, despite his prejudices, was the most stimulating she had
ever known. But although she heard of him often, for he had covered
himself with glory, she had seen him o