If not German, I must be a friend.  Yet if I were I would not dare talk—­ not with German sentries all about.  She lifted her hand from the suds and swung it out to the west toward England and France with an eager, craving fire in her eyes, and then she swept it across in front of her as if she were sweeping a spider off a table.  When it stopped at arm’s length there was the triumph of hate in her eyes.  I thought of the lid of a cauldron raised to let out a burst of steam as she asked “When?” When?  When would the Allies come and turn the Germans out?

She was a kind, hardworking woman, who would help any stranger in trouble the best she knew how.  Probably that Saxon whose smile had spread under his scarf had much the same kind of wife.  Yet I knew that if the Allies’ guns were heard driving the Germans past her house and her husband had a rifle, he would put a shot in that Saxon’s back, or she would pour boiling water on his head if she could.  Then, if the Germans had time, they would burn the farmhouse and kill the husband who had shot one of their comrades.

I recollect a youth who had been in a railroad accident saying:  “That was the first time I had ever seen death; the first time I realized what death was.”  Exactly.  You don’t know death till you have seen it; you don’t know invasion till you have felt it.  However wise, however able the conquerors, life under them is a living death.  True, the farmer’s property was untouched, but his liberty was gone.  If you, a well-behaved citizen, have ever been arrested and marched through the streets of your home town by a policeman, how did you like it?  Give the policeman a rifle and a fixed bayonet and a full cartridge-box and transform him into a foreigner and the experience would not be any more pleasant.

That farmer could not go to the next town without the permission of the sentries.  He could not even mail a letter to his son who was in the trenches with the Allies.  The Germans had taken his horse; theirs the power to take anything he had—­the power of the bayonet.  If he wanted to send his produce to a foreign market, if he wanted to buy food in a foreign market, the British naval blockade closed the sea to him.  He was sitting on a chair of steel spikes, hands tied and mouth gagged, whilst his mind seethed, solacing its hate with hope through the long winter months.  If you lived in Kansas and could not get your wheat to Chicago, or any groceries or newspapers from the nearest town, or learn whether your son in Wyoming were alive or dead, or whether the man who owned your mortgage in New York had foreclosed it or not—­well, that is enough without the German sentry.

Only, instead of newspapers or word about the mortgage, the thing you needed past that blockade was bread to keep you from starving.  America opened a window and slipped a loaf into the empty larder.  Those Belgian soldiers whom I had seen at Dixmude, wounded, exhausted, mud-caked, shivering, were happy beside the people at home.  They were in the fight.  It is not the destruction of towns and houses that impresses you most, but the misery expressed by that peasant woman over her washtub.