thinking what I was doing, I put it into German.

Then I nearly fell out of the bed. Von Einem--the name I had heard at
Gaudian's house, the name Stumm had spoken behind his hand, the name to
which Hilda was probably the prefix. It was a tremendous
discovery--the first real bit of light I had found. Harry Bullivant
knew that some man or woman called von Einem was at the heart of the
mystery. Stumm had spoken of the same personage with respect and in
connection with the work I proposed to do in raising the Moslem
Africans. If I found von Einem I would be getting very warm. What was
the word that Stumm had whispered to Gaudian and scared that worthy?
It had sounded like _uhnmantl_. If I could only get that clear, I would
solve the riddle.

I think that discovery completed my cure. At any rate on the evening
of the fifth day--it was Wednesday, the 29th of December--I was well
enough to get up. When the dark had fallen and it was too late to fear
a visitor, I came downstairs and, wrapped in my green cape, took a seat
by the fire.

As we sat there in the firelight, with the three white-headed children
staring at me with saucer eyes, and smiling when I looked their way,
the woman talked. Her man had gone to the wars on the Eastern front,
and the last she had heard from him he was in a Polish bog and longing
for his dry native woodlands. The struggle meant little to her. It
was an act of God, a thunderbolt out of the sky, which had taken a
husband from her, and might soon make her a widow and her children
fatherless. She knew nothing of its causes and purposes, and thought
of the Russians as a gigantic nation of savages, heathens who had never
been converted, and who would eat up German homes if the good Lord and
the brave German soldiers did not stop them. I tried hard to find out
if she had any notion of affairs in the West, but she hadn't, beyond
the fact that there was trouble with the French. I doubt if she knew
of England's share in it. She was a decent soul, with no bitterness
against anybody, not even the Russians if they would spare her man.

That night I realized the crazy folly of war. When I saw the
splintered shell of Ypres and heard hideous tales of German doings, I
used to want to see the whole land of the Boche given up to fire and
sword. I thought we could never end the war properly without giving
the Huns some of their own medicine. But that woodcutter's cottage
cured me of such nightm