“You thought I would take advantage of it,” she suggested. He laughed and put his arm round her. “Poor little woman,” he said. “You’re looking so tired. It was jolly at the end.” He kissed her.!

“I think God must want you very badly,” she said, “or He wouldn’t have laid so heavy a cross upon you. You will come?” “No,” answered the girl. “I may have just told her. She isn’t the sort that gives advice.”

“Yes,” she answered. “And I’m glad that I did it,” she added, defiantly. “So you wanted to see it with your own eyes,” he said. He laid his hand upon her shoulder, and she had some difficulty in not catching hold of him and clinging to him. She was feeling absurdly womanish just at that moment. “It is not only courage,” he said, “that War brings out. It brings out vile things too. Oh, I’m not thinking merely of the Boches. That’s the cant of every nation: that all the heroism is on one side and all the brutality on the other. Take men from anywhere and some of them will be devils. War gives them their opportunity, brings out the beast. Can you wonder at it? You teach a man to plunge a bayonet into the writhing flesh of a fellow human being, and twist it round and round and jamb it further in, while the blood is spurting from him like a fountain. What are you making of him but a beast? A man’s got to be a beast before he can bring himself to do it. I have seen things done by our own men in cold blood, the horror of which will haunt my memory until I die. But of course, we hush it up when it happens to be our own people.”