about you--But I wake up at night and this
silence of months is like a dead weight on my heart.

RUTH.

IV

_September._

_Dear ones:--_

The Germans are advancing. Nothing seems able to stop them. And every
day brings new refugees from the country. They come in bewildered,
frightened hordes and pass through the city streets, directed by
gendarmes. They do as they are told. There is something dreadful in
their submission and in the gentle alacrity with which they obey orders.

The other day we were waiting on a street corner for a line of the
refugees' covered carts to pass. Suddenly, a woman, walking by a horse's
head, collapsed. She sank on to the paving-stones like a bundle of dusty
rags. People stopped to look, but no one touched her. The refugees
behind left their carts and came up to see what had halted the
procession. They, too, stood without touching her--peasants in dusty
sheepskins, leaning on their staffs, looking down at the woman who had
fallen out of their ranks. A gendarme elbowed his way through the crowd.
He began to wave his arms and strike his boot with his whip, and shout
at the weary-eyed, uncomprehending peasants. At last, two of them tucked
their staffs under their arms and, leaning down, picked up the fainting
woman. They carried her round to her cart and laid her down on the
straw, her head on the lap of one of her children. For a moment the
child looked down at her mother's white face, so strangely still, and
then, terrified, suddenly jumped to her feet and her mother's head fell
back against the boards with a dull thud. The children huddled together,
crying. A peasant whipped up the little horse, and the procession began
to move on.

There seems to be a horrible fear behind them that never lets them halt
for long. The Germans--After all, they are human beings like the
Russians. They, too, have their wounded and dying. People here speak of
special red trains that leave the front continuously for Germany. These
red trains are full of human beings whose brains have been smashed by
the horrors of war. The German soldier is not supernatural. Then I think
of those terrible red trains rushing through the dark, filled with
raving maniacs, of men who have become like little children again. And
yet when you hear, "The Germans are advancing! They are coming!" the
German army seems to take on a supernatural aspect, to be