“Marta, you genius!” Lanstron cried.  “You are the real general!  You—­”

“Not that, please!” she broke in.  “I’m as foul and depraved as a dealer in subtle poisons in the Middle Ages!  Oh, the shame of it, while I look into his eyes and feign admiration, feign everything which will draw out his plans!  I can never forget the sight of him as he told me how two or three or four hundred thousand men were to be crowded into a ram, as he called it—­a ram of human flesh!—­and guns enough in support, he said, to tear any redoubts to pieces; guns enough to make their shells as thick as the bullets from an automatic!”

“We’ll meet ram with ram!  We’ll have some guns, too!” exclaimed Lanstron.  “We’ll send as heavy a shell fire at their infantry as they send into our redoubts.”

“Yes; oh, yes!” she replied.  “Westerling couldn’t say it any better!  What difference is there between you?  Each at his desk is saying:  ’This regiment will die here; that regiment will die there!’ I bring you word of one human ram going to destruction in order that you may send another to destroy and be destroyed!  And I’m worse than you.  I am the go-between in the conspiracy of universal murder, sleeping in a good bed every night, in no danger—­when I can sleep; but I can’t.  I go mad from thinking of my part, keying myself up deliriously to each fresh deceit!”

With every sentence her voice broke and it seemed that she would not be able to utter another.  Yet she kept on in the alternation of taut, pitiful monotone and dry, coughing sobs.

“How have I ever been able to go as far as I have?  How did I get through this last scene?  When it seems as if I were about to collapse, something supports me.  When the thing grows too horrible and I am about to cry out to Westerling that I am false, I hear his boast that he made the war as a last step in his ambition.  And there is Dellarme’s smile rising before me.  He died so finely in defence of our garden!  When my brain goes numb and I can’t think what to say, can’t act, Feller appears, prompting with ready word and facile change of expression, and I have my wits again.  I go on!  I go on!”

A racking sob, now, and silence; then, in the sudden effort of one who must change the subject to hold his sanity, she asked: 

“How is Feller?  Is he doing well?”

“Yes.”

“At least I have brought him happiness.  Sometimes I think that is about all the good I have accomplished—­I, his successor in carrying out your plans!  Oh, I’m burned out, Lanny!  I’m ashes.  It doesn’t seem that I can ever be sane or clean and human again.  In order to forget I should have to find a new life, like Feller.  Each morning when I look in the mirror I expect to see my hair turned white, like his.”

Lanstron felt her suffering as if it were his own.  He had let his patriotic passion overwhelm every other consideration.  He had allowed her to be a spy; he had sacrificed her sensibilities along with the battalions he had sent into battle.  She was right:  he was only the inhuman head of a machine.  And she and Feller—­they were human.  Destiny playing in the crux of war’s inconsistencies had formed a bond between them.