med without an order from the Imperial Government. The
Governor-General himself had gone to Berlin.

[Sidenote: Whitlock and Villalobar.]

And then came Villalobar, and I thanked him for what he had done. He
told me much, and described the scene the night before in that anteroom
with Lancken. The Marquis was much concerned about the Countess Jeanne
de Belleville and Madame Thuiliez, both French, and hence protegees of
his, condemned to die within eight days; but I told him not to be
concerned; that the effect of Miss Cavell's martyrdom did not end with
her death; it would procure other liberations, this among them; the
thirst for blood had been slaked and there would be no more executions
in that group; it was the way of the law of blood vengeance. We talked a
long time about the tragedy and about the even larger tragedy of the
war.

"We are getting old," he said. "Life is going; and after the war, if we
live in that new world, we shall be of the old--the new generation will
push us aside."

[Sidenote: Miss Cavell's death wins mercy for others.]

Gibson and de Leval prepared reports of the whole matter, and I sent
them by the next courier to our Embassy at London. But somehow that very
day the news got into Holland and shocked the world. Richards, of the
C. R. B., just back from The Hague, said that they had already heard of
it there and were filled with horror. And even the Germans, who seemed
always to do a deed and to consider its effect afterward, knew that they
had another Louvain, another _Lusitania_, for which to answer before the
bar of civilization. The lives of the three others remaining, of the
five condemned to death, were ultimately spared, as I had told
Villalobar they would be. The King of Spain and the President of the
United States made representations at Berlin in behalf of the Countess
de Belleville and Madame Thuiliez, and their sentences were commuted to
imprisonment, as was that of Louis Severin, the Brussels druggist. The
storm of universal loathing and reprobation for the deed was too much
even for the Germans.

* * * * *

In an earlier chapter we have read of the beginning of the attempt to
cross the Dardanelles and to capture the Peninsula of Gallipoli. After
great losses and terrible suffering had been endured in these attempts,
it was decided in December, 1915, by the British war authorities that
further sacrifices were not justified. Preparations were a