yright, 1917, by The Pagan Publishing Company.
Copyright, 1918, by Fanny Kemble Johnson.]

BY FANNY KEMBLE JOHNSON

From _The Pagan_

A TINY village lay among the mountains of a country from which for four
years the men had gone forth to fight. First the best men had gone, then
the older men, then the youths, and lastly the school boys. It will be
seen that no men could have been left in the village except the very
aged, and the bodily incapacitated, who soon died, owing to the war
policy of the Government which was to let the useless perish that there
might be more food for the useful.

Now it chanced that while all the men went away, save those left to die
of slow starvation, only a few returned, and these few were crippled and
disfigured in various ways. One young man had only part of a face, and
had to wear a painted tin mask, like a holiday-maker. Another had two
legs but no arms, and another two arms but no legs. One man could
scarcely be looked at by his own mother, having had his eyes burned out
of his head until he stared like Death. One had neither arms nor legs,
and was mad of his misery besides, and lay all day in a cradle like a
baby. And there was a quite old man who strangled night and day from
having sucked in poison-gas; and another, a mere boy, who shook, like a
leaf in a high wind, from shell-shock, and screamed at a sound. And he
too had lost a hand, and part of his face, though not enough to warrant
the expense of a mask for him.

All these men, except he who had been crazed by horror of himself, had
been furnished with ingenious appliances to enable them to be partly
self-supporting, and to earn enough to pay their share of the taxes
which burdened their defeated nation.

To go through that village after the war was something like going
through a life-sized toy-village with all the mechanical figures wound
up and clicking. Only instead of the figures being new, and gay, and
pretty, they were battered and grotesque and inhuman.

There would be the windmill, and the smithy, and the public house. There
would be the row of cottages, the village church, the sparkling
waterfall, the parti-colored fields spread out like bright kerchiefs on
the hillsides, the parading fowl, the goats and cows,--though not many
of these last. There would be the women, and with them some children;
very few, however, for the women had been getting reasonable, and were
now refusing to have sons who might one day be s