When she was ordered to take charge of a hospital in Lille in June of the second year of the war she had forced herself to accept the present state of Europe with a certain philosophy.  After all, war was its normal, its historic, condition.  Following a somewhat unusual interval of peace, owing to the beneficent reign of the German Emperor, the war microbes of Europe, cultured in the Balkan swamps, had, through some miscalculation, after a deplorable assassination, ravaged the entire continent instead of being localized as heretofore.  Men were men and kings were kings and war was war.  Gisela sometimes wondered if the hideous upheaval were anybody’s fault, if the desire to fight had not been more or less simultaneous in spite of the fact that Germany was caught napping and permitted Russia and France to sneak over her frontiers.

The sinking of the Lusitania and other passenger ships, or rather the results, had filled her with a horror that might have developed into protest had she not been assured that the U-boats had purposely waited for a calm sea, not too far from shore, that the passengers might have every opportunity for escape; and that they had been the victims of contraband cargoes of ammunition exploding, badly adjusted life-boats, panic among themselves, and utter inefficiency and selfishness of the officers and crew.

These excuses sounded plausible to a young woman still too occupied to ponder; but during her journey through Belgium and the invaded districts of France her mind grew more and more uneasy.  Surely an army so uniformly victorious, an army which only forebore to press forward in a battle—­like that of the Marne, for instance—­for sound strategic reasons, should have found it unnecessary to destroy whole towns with their priceless monuments of art, level countless insignificant villages, and reduce their inhabitants to cowering misery.  She had been a student of history and had inferred that modern warfare was as humane as war may be; witness the fine magnanimity of the Japanese, an Oriental race.  This passing country, which she had known well in its hey-day, looked extraordinarily like the historical pictures of the invasions of Goths and Vandals and Huns.

“Huns!” She had resented the constant use of the word in the English papers, dismissing it finally as childish spite.  Had its usurpation of the classic and noble word “Germans” been one of those quick, merciless, simultaneous designations that fly through every army in wartime and are as apt as they are inevitable?

She felt a sudden desire to “talk it out” with Franz von Nettelbeck, whose mind, despite his prejudices, was the most stimulating she had ever known.  But although she heard of him often, for he had covered himself with glory, she had seen him only once—­from a window in Berlin as he promenaded Unter den Linden; a superb and haughty figure, his swelling chest covered with medals.