allow all the twaddle that the papers give us; and cheer the fine,
black-coated gentlemen when they tell us it's our sacred duty to kill
Germans, or Italians, or Russians, or anybody else. We are just crazy to
kill something: it doesn't matter what. If it's to be Germans, we shout
'_A Berlin_!'; and if it's to be Russians we cheer for Liberty. I was in
Paris at the time of the Fashoda trouble. How we hissed the English in
the cafes! And how they glared back at us! They were just as eager to
kill us. Who makes a dog fight? Why, the dog. Anybody can do it. Who
could make us fight each other, if we didn't want to? Not all the king's
horses and all the King's men. No, my dears, it's we make the wars. You
and me, my dears."

There came a day in early spring. All night long the guns had never
ceased. It sounded like the tireless barking of ten thousand giant dogs.
Behind the hills, the whole horizon, like a fiery circle, was ringed with
flashing light. Shapeless forms, bent beneath burdens, passed in endless
procession through the village. Masses of rushing men swept like shadowy
phantoms through the fitfully-illumined darkness. Beneath that
everlasting barking, Joan would hear, now the piercing wail of a child;
now a clap of thunder that for the moment would drown all other sounds,
followed by a faint, low, rumbling crash, like the shooting of coals into
a cellar. The wounded on their beds lay with wide-open, terrified eyes,
moving feverishly from side to side.

At dawn the order came that the hospital was to be evacuated. The
ambulances were already waiting in the street. Joan flew up the ladder
to her loft, the other side of the yard. Madame Lelanne was already
there. She had thrown a few things into a bundle, and her foot was again
upon the ladder, when it seemed to her that someone struck her, hurling
her back upon the floor, and the house the other side of the yard rose up
into the air, and then fell quite slowly, and a cloud of dust hid it from
her sight.

Madame Lelanne must have carried her down the ladder. She was standing
in the yard, and the dust was choking her. Across the street, beyond the
ruins of the hospital, swarms of men were running about like ants when
their nest has been disturbed. Some were running this way, and some
that. And then they would turn and run back again, making dancing
movements round one another and jostling one another. The guns had
ceased; and instead, it s