ual
leadership. But if she had no talent for intimacy she had much for
friendship, and the friends of her inner circle were all women, partly
because there was no waste of time fending off love-making, partly
because there were more interests in common, consequently a deeper bond.
To-night she was filled with an irresistible pity and a longing to set
them free. But her hands were tied. She dared not even go to Great
Headquarters and protest against the terrible fate of the young girls of
Lille. She would have accomplished no good and become an instant object
of suspicion.

3

For many months she did her duty doggedly, her indignation routed by the
disquieting fact that the Germans were retreating from the Somme; inch
by inch, but still retreating. Once she might have been satisfied with
grandiose phrases and scornful assurances. But the long attack on Verdun
had ended in dark humiliation; a failure that the most resourceful
vocabulary was unable to translate into a German advantage, optically
inverted.

More than half a million young Germans had fallen before Verdun, and for
what? That France, disdained these many years by the mighty Teutonic
Empire, and numerically inferior, might demonstrate to the world that
she was the greater military nation of the two.

What was it all for? What of the ever-receding fields of peace, grown
green and fat again? What of the racing past dotted with the broken
headstones of promises of victory by this means or that?

But to attempt to answer historical enigmas while working day and night
over the mangled victims of the Somme was beyond her powers. It was not
until she broke down, and, with Heloise von Erkel and Mimi Brandt,
obtained leave to spend a month at St. Moritz, that she found her
answer.

III

1

The three girls went to a little hotel that had been a favorite resort
of Gisela's in times of peace when she had felt an imperative need of
the high solitudes and eternal snows. They planned a week's rest, and a
fortnight or more of mountain climbing, dismissing the world war from
their minds as far as possible. But their gentle plans were upset on the
eighth day after their arrival, when at the end of an hour's hard
skating, clad in the bright sweaters and caps of old, Gisela suddenly
stopped short and returned the hard stare of two young women who had
drawn apart and were evidently discussing her. That they were Americans
Gisela recognized at a glance, but for