lay-acting before his people, and then, with two smacks kaput!
Fellow looked like a fool! It's part of the system, you see."

"That was it, you think?" The explanation explained nothing to
Jovannic, least of all his own sensations when the sudden surrender
and the sad, pitying mirth had succeeded to the struggle and the
violence. He let Captain Hahn preach his German gospel of system on
earth and organization to man, and walked beside him in silence, with
pensive eyes fixed ahead, where the prisoner and his escort moved in
a plodding black group.

He had not that gift of seeing life and its agents in the barren
white light of his own purposes which so simplified things for
Captain Hahn. He was a son of that mesalliance of nations which was
Austria-Hungary Slavs, their slipping grasp clutching at eternity,
Transylvanians, with pervert Latin ardors troubling their blood, had
blended themselves in him; and he was young. Life for him was a depth
not a surface, as for Captain Hahn; facts were but the skeleton of
truth; glamour clad them and made them vital. He had been transferred
to the Italian front from Russia, where his unripe battalion had lain
in reserve throughout his service; his experiences of the rush over
the Isonzo, of the Italian debacle and the occupation of the province
of Friuli, lay undigested on his mental stomach. It was as though by
a single violent gesture he had translated himself from the quiet
life in his regiment, which had become normal and familiar, to the
hush and mystery of the vast Italian plain, where the crops grew
lavishly as weeds and the trees shut out the distances.

The great villa, whither they were bound, had a juncture of antique
wall, pierced with grilles of beaten iron; its gate, a delicacy of
filigree, let them through to the ordered beauty of the lawns, over
which the mansion presided, a pale, fine presence of a house. Hedges
of yew, like walls of ebony, bounded the principal walks. The
prisoner and the retinue of soldiers that dignified him went ahead;
the two officers, acknowledging the crash of arms of the sentry's
salute at the gate, followed. The improvised prison was in the long
wing of the building that housed the stables. They took the crackling
pebble path that led to it.

"Nu!" Captain Hahn slacked his military gait at one of the formal
openings in the wall of yews that shut them from the lawns before the
great housed serene white front. "The women see?"

But Jovann