A conquered empire that had been hypnotized to the end by the monster criminals of history, whose word no man would ever take again, would be a mere collection of enslaved States for generations to come; the conquerors, having given them their choice, would show no mercy.

Britain could not be starved.  The submarine war, whatever its devastations, and the vast inconveniences it had caused, was a failure.  And the colossal wealth of the United States in money, in food, in men!  Who knew her resources better than Gisela, who had lived in the country for four years and found it an absorbing study, who had continued to read American books, newspapers, and reviews up to the outbreak of the war?  Well, they were all at the disposal of democracy; and as the Entente Allies, including the United States, were already many times stronger than Germany, how could they fail to win in the end, no matter how many millions of lives on all sides Germany continued to shovel into Moloch?

All of these three clever German girls had been more or less prepared to hear Germany proved a liar.  They knew from British wounded that London was neither a fortified city nor reduced to ashes; also that all the Zeppelin raids on defenseless towns put together had been of less strategical value to Germany than the taking of one village in the war zone; she had merely piled up a mountain of hatred and contempt which must be leveled by the quick repudiation of her people if they would regain their lost intercourse with a triumphant world.  Like all the other women who had nursed near the front and knew the truth, they translated into their own cynical vernacular such grandiose collocations as “Strategic retreats” from that of the Battle of the Marne to those which had been occurring periodically on the Western front since the beginning of the Somme offensive of 1916.

3

Gisela’s mind was complex and subtle, but it was also honest.  When it yielded a point, it yielded audibly.  It was during the preliminary discussion that she exclaimed: 

“It is true—­certain things come back to me—­Mimi, open the window.  The air is blue and we are all hardy and can stand the night air.  It was after the Agadir incident that I felt a change.  I say felt because I was so absorbed in my work that I had no inclination for world politics and never discussed them.  Up to that time I had never heard a hint of war for aggression on the part of Germany....  While, as far back as I can remember, it was taken for granted there would be a great war some day, I doubt if any but the military party really believed in it.  We thought the time had passed for real wars, that we were far too highly civilized.  Of course I knew that the military party to which my father belonged would have welcomed a war, for war was their profession, their game, their excuse for being, and I heard more or less talk among my brothers of Pan-Germanism; but still I imagined that it was