ce and famine. Read Defoe's account
of the Plague of London. How men and women left their safe homes, to
serve in the pest-houses, knowing that sooner or later they were doomed.
Read of the mothers in India who die of slow starvation, never allowing a
morsel of food to pass their lips so that they may save up their own
small daily portion to add it to their children's. Why don't we pray to
God not to withhold from us His precious medicine of pestilence and
famine? So is shipwreck a fine school for courage. Look at the chance
it gives the captain to set a fine example. And the engineers who stick
to their post with the water pouring in upon them. We don't reconcile
ourselves to shipwrecks as a necessary school for sailors. We do our
best to lessen them. So did persecution bring out heroism. It made
saints and martyrs. Why have we done away with it? If this game of
killing and being killed is the fine school for virtue it is made out to
be, then all our efforts towards law and order have been a mistake. We
never ought to have emerged from the jungle."

He took a note-book from under his pillow and commenced to scribble.

An old-looking man spoke. He lay with his arms folded across his breast,
addressing apparently the smoky rafters. He was a Russian, a teacher of
languages in Paris at the outbreak of the war, and had joined the French
Army.

"It is not only courage," he said, "that War brings out. It brings out
vile things too. Oh, I'm not thinking merely of the Boches. That's the
cant of every nation: that all the heroism is on one side and all the
brutality on the other. Take men from anywhere and some of them will be
devils. War gives them their opportunity, brings out the beast. Can you
wonder at it? You teach a man to plunge a bayonet into the writhing
flesh of a fellow human being, and twist it round and round and jamb it
further in, while the blood is spurting from him like a fountain. What
are you making of him but a beast? A man's got to be a beast before he
can bring himself to do it. I have seen things done by our own men in
cold blood, the horror of which will haunt my memory until I die. But of
course, we hush it up when it happens to be our own people."

He ceased speaking. No one seemed inclined to break the silence.

They remained confused in her memory, these talks among the wounded men
in the low, dimly lighted hut that had become her world. At times it was
but two men spe