Sheila was helping another head nurse do dressings in
the ward outside.

There were only a few minutes after the siren blew before the first of the
great Fokkers appeared over the city. Monsieur Satan's mind went strangely
blank; the children stopped their play and gaped stupidly into the sky;
Sheila did nothing but listen. Then the bombs began to rain down on the
city. The noise was terrific. The children ran aimlessly about, shrieking
pitifully. It was this that set Monsieur Satan's mind to working again. He
broke out of the little room like the madman he was. He might have been
Lucifer himself as he stumbled along on his bandaged foot, his hair erect,
his eyes blazing a thousand inextinguishable fires. In the corridor he
came upon Sheila, with other nurses and doctors, hurrying to gather in the
out-of-door patients. As he overtook them a bomb struck the hospital.

"Sacrebleu!" he shouted. "You bungler! you fool of a destroyer! It was not
the hour--and the children--First I go to save them. Afterward I come to
kill you, ma'am'selle."

He was out before them all, through the entrance and down the steps, when
another bomb struck. The doorway and the pillars were crushed to gravel
and Monsieur Satan was hurled headlong across the gardens. In an instant
he was up, stumbling frantically toward the children, his arms
outstretched in appealing vindication to those small, quivering faces
turned to him in their hour of annihilation. "Mes enfants, have no fear. I
come--I come."

A third bomb fell. The children were tumbled in a heap like a pile of
jackstraws. Monsieur Satan had time enough to see them go down before a
fourth followed with the quick precision of an automatic. Yes, he saw; and
in that horror-smiting moment believed it all a part of his great scheme
of destruction; then the universe went to pieces about him and something
crumbled inside his brain. He stood transfixed to the earth, staring
helplessly in front of him, as immovable as a graven image.

It is one of the anomalies of war that the things that apparently destroy
sometimes re-create. The gigantic impact of exploding masses may destroy a
man's hearing, his sight, his memory, or his mercy, and leave him thus
maimed for all time. But it happens, sometimes, that the first shock is
followed by another which restores with the suddenness of a miracle and
makes the man whole again. That delicate bit of human mechanism which has
been battered out of place is b