“I don’t want to kill anybody,” he repeated.  “I never did want to kill anybody.  I only want to go home.”  As we left him he was repeating a refrain:  “I want to go home”—­“Schrecklich, schrecklich.”  “I never did want to kill anybody.”

Every instinct in that man’s soul was against the murder he had been set to do.  His conscience had been crucified.  A ruthless power had invaded his domain, dragged him from his hearthside, placed a gun in his hands and said to him:  “Kill!”

Perhaps before the war, as he had drilled along the German roads, he had made some feeble protest.  But then war seemed so unreal and so far away; now the horror of it was in his soul.

A few days later Van Hee was obliged to return him to the German lines.  Again he was marched out to the shambles to take up the killings against which his whole nature was in rebellion.  No slave ever went whipped to his task with greater loathing.

Once I saw slowly plodding back into Brussels a long gray line of soldiers; the sky, too, was gray and a gray weariness had settled down upon the spirits of these troops returning from the destruction of a village.  I was standing by the roadside holding in my arms a refugee baby.

Its attention was caught by an officer on horseback and in baby fashion it began waving its hand at him.  Arrested by this sudden gleam of human sunshine the stern features of the officer relaxed into a smile.  Forgetting for the moment his dignity he waved his hand at the baby in a return salute, turning his face away from his men that they might not see the tears in his eyes.  But we could see them.

Perhaps through those tears he saw the mirage of his own fireside.  Perhaps for the moment his homing spirit rested there, and it was only the body from which the soul had fled that was in the saddle here before us riding through a hostile land.  Perhaps more powerfully than the fulminations of any orator had this greeting of a little child operated to smite him with the senseless folly of this war.  Who knows but that right then there came flashing into his mind the thought:  “Why not be done with this cruel orphaning of Belgian babies, this burning down of their homes and turning them adrift upon the world?”

Brutalizing as may be the effect of militarism in action, fortified as its devotees may be by all the iron ethics of its code, I cannot help but believe that here again the ever-recurring miracle of repentance and regeneration had been wrought by the grace of a baby’s smile; that again this stern-visaged officer had become just a human being longing for peace and home, revolting against laying waste the peace and homes of his fellowmen.  But to what avail?  All things would conspire to make him conform and stifle the revolt within.  How could he escape from the toils in which he was held?  Next morrow or next week he would again be in the saddle riding out to destruction.