orm,
sweet-mannered and smiling as though all war meant to him was a mere
change of attire, and she would exclaim enigmatically:

"What luck that you will never have to go to the front! . . . How fine
that you don't run any risks!"

And her lover would accept these words as but another proof of her
affectionate interest.

One day Don Marcelo was able to appreciate the horrors of the war
without leaving Paris. Three thousand Belgian refugees were quartered
provisionally in the circus before being distributed among the
provinces. When Desnoyers entered this place, he saw in the vestibule
the same posters which had been flaunting their spectacular gayeties
when he had visited it a few months before with his family.

Now he noticed the odor from a sick and miserable multitude crowded
together--like the exhalation from a prison or poorhouse infirmary. He
saw a throng that seemed crazy or stupefied with grief. They did not
know exactly where they were; they had come thither, they didn't know
how. The terrible spectacle of the invasion was still so persistent in
their minds that it left room for no other impression. They were still
seeing the helmeted men in their peaceful hamlets, their homes in
flames, the soldiery firing upon those who were fleeing, the mutilated
women done to death by incessant adulterous assault, the old men burned
alive, the children stabbed in their cradles by human beasts inflamed
by alcohol and license. . . . Some of the octogenarians were weeping as
they told how the soldiers of a civilized nation were cutting off the
breasts from the women in order to nail them to the doors, how they had
passed around as a trophy a new-born babe spiked on a bayonet, how they
had shot aged men in the very armchair in which they were huddled in
their sorrowful weakness, torturing them first with their jests and
taunts.

They had fled blindly, pursued by fire and shot, as crazed with terror
as the people of the middle ages trying not to be ridden down by the
hordes of galloping Huns and Mongols. And this flight had been across
the country in its loveliest festal array, in the most productive of
months, when the earth was bristling with ears of grain, when the August
sky was most brilliant, and when the birds were greeting the opulent
harvest with their glad songs!

In that circus, filled with the wandering crowds, the immense crime was
living again. The children were crying with a sound like the bleating
of lam