us
voyages. He had brought with him from Paris a quantity of gold pieces,
and he pulled out a coin which glittered in the sun. Bread was needed,
everything eatable was needed; he would pay without haggling.

The flash of gold aroused looks of enthusiasm and greediness, but this
impression was short-lived, all eyes contemplating the yellow discs
with indifference. Don Marcelo was himself convinced that the miraculous
charm had lost its power. They all chanted a chorus of sorrow and
horrors with slow and plaintive voice, as though they stood weeping
before a bier: "Monsieur, they have killed my husband." . . . "Monsieur,
my sons! Two of them are missing." . . . "Monsieur, they have taken all
the men prisoners: they say it is to work the land in Germany." . . .
"Monsieur, bread! . . . My little ones are dying of hunger!"

One woman was lamenting something worse than death. "My girl! . . . My
poor girl!" Her look of hatred and wild desperation revealed the secret
tragedy; her outcries and tears recalled that other mother who was
sobbing in the same way up at the castle. In the depths of some cave,
was lying the victim, half-dead with fatigue, shaken with a wild
delirium in which she still saw the succession of brutal faces, inflamed
with simian passion.

The miserable group, forming themselves into a circle around him,
stretched out their hands beseechingly toward the man whom they knew to
be so very rich. The women showed him the death-pallor on the faces
of their scarcely breathing babies, their eyes glazed with starvation.
"Bread! . . . bread!" they implored, as though he could work a miracle.
He gave to one mother the gold piece that he had in his hand and
distributed more to the others. They took them without looking at them,
and continued their lament, "Bread! . . . Bread!" And he had gone to the
village to make the same supplication! . . . He fled, recognizing the
uselessness of his efforts.

CHAPTER VI

THE BANNER OF THE RED CROSS

Returning in desperation to his estate, Don Marcelo Desnoyers saw
huge automobiles and men on horseback, forming a very long convoy and
completely filling the road. They were all going in his direction. At
the entrance to the park a band of Germans was putting up the wires for
a telephone line. They had just been reconnoitering the rooms befouled
with the night's saturnalia, and were ha-haing boisterously over Captain
von Hartrott's inscription, "Bitte, nicht plundern." To th