Then she would look at Rene in his exquisitely fresh uniform, sweet-mannered and smiling as though all war meant to him was a mere change of attire, and she would exclaim enigmatically: 

“What luck that you will never have to go to the front! . . .  How fine that you don’t run any risks!”

And her lover would accept these words as but another proof of her affectionate interest.

One day Don Marcelo was able to appreciate the horrors of the war without leaving Paris.  Three thousand Belgian refugees were quartered provisionally in the circus before being distributed among the provinces.  When Desnoyers entered this place, he saw in the vestibule the same posters which had been flaunting their spectacular gayeties when he had visited it a few months before with his family.

Now he noticed the odor from a sick and miserable multitude crowded together—­like the exhalation from a prison or poorhouse infirmary.  He saw a throng that seemed crazy or stupefied with grief.  They did not know exactly where they were; they had come thither, they didn’t know how.  The terrible spectacle of the invasion was still so persistent in their minds that it left room for no other impression.  They were still seeing the helmeted men in their peaceful hamlets, their homes in flames, the soldiery firing upon those who were fleeing, the mutilated women done to death by incessant adulterous assault, the old men burned alive, the children stabbed in their cradles by human beasts inflamed by alcohol and license. . . .  Some of the octogenarians were weeping as they told how the soldiers of a civilized nation were cutting off the breasts from the women in order to nail them to the doors, how they had passed around as a trophy a new-born babe spiked on a bayonet, how they had shot aged men in the very armchair in which they were huddled in their sorrowful weakness, torturing them first with their jests and taunts.

They had fled blindly, pursued by fire and shot, as crazed with terror as the people of the middle ages trying not to be ridden down by the hordes of galloping Huns and Mongols.  And this flight had been across the country in its loveliest festal array, in the most productive of months, when the earth was bristling with ears of grain, when the August sky was most brilliant, and when the birds were greeting the opulent harvest with their glad songs!

In that circus, filled with the wandering crowds, the immense crime was living again.  The children were crying with a sound like the bleating of lambs; the men were looking wildly around with terrified eyes; the frenzied women were howling like the insane.  Families had become separated in the terror of flight.  A mother of five little ones now had but one.  The parents, as they realized the number missing, were thinking with anguish of those who had disappeared.  Would they ever find them again? . . .  Or were they already dead? . . .

Don Marcelo returned home, grinding his teeth and waving his cane in an alarming manner.  Ah, the bandits! . . .  If only his sister-in-law could change her sex!  Why wasn’t she a man? . . .  It would be better still if she could suddenly assume the form of her husband, von Hartrott.  What an interesting interview the two brothers-in-law would have! . . .