“They are going to kill him,” she kept saying to Desnoyers.  “That wound was a forewarning from heaven.”

When passing through the streets, she trembled with emotion at sight of the invalid soldiers.  The convalescents of energetic appearance, filled her with the greatest pity.  They made her think of a certain trip with her husband to San Sebastian where a bull fight had made her cry out with indignation and compassion, pitying the fate of the poor, gored horses.  With entrails hanging, they were taken to the corrals, and submitted to a hurried adjustment in order that they might return to the arena stimulated by a false energy.  Again and again they were reduced to this makeshift cobbling until finally a fatal goring finished them. . . .  These recently cured men continually brought to her mind those poor beasts.  Some had been wounded three times since the beginning of the war, and were returning surgically patched together and re-galvanized to take another chance in the lottery of Fate, always in the expectation of the supreme blow. . . .  Ay, her son!

Desnoyers waxed very indignant over his wife’s low spirits, retorting: 

“But I tell you that Nobody will kill Julio! . . .  He is my son.  In my youth I, too, passed through great dangers.  They wounded me, too, in the wars in the other world, and nevertheless, here I am at a ripe old age.”

Events seemed to reinforce his blind faith.  Calamities were raining around the family and saddening his relatives, yet not one grazed the intrepid sub-lieutenant who was persisting in his daring deeds with the heroic nerve of a musketeer.

Dona Luisa received a letter from Germany.  Her sister wrote from Berlin, transmitting her letters through the kindness of a South American in Switzerland.  This time, the good lady wept for some one besides her son; she wept for Elena and the enemies.  In Germany there were mothers, too, and she put the sentiment of maternity above all patriotic differences.

Poor Frau von Hartrott!  Her letter written a month before, had contained nothing but death notices and words of despair.  Captain Otto was dead.  Dead, too, was one of his younger brothers.  The fact that the latter had fallen in a territory dominated by their nation, at least gave the mother the sad comfort of being able to weep near his grave.  But the Captain was buried on French soil, nobody knew where, and she would never be able to find his remains, mingled with hundreds of others.  A third son was wounded in Poland.  Her two daughters had lost their promised lovers, and the sight of their silent grief, was intensifying the mother’s suffering.  Von Hartrott continued presiding over patriotic societies and making plans of expansion after the near victory, but he had aged greatly in the last few months.  The “sage” was the only one still holding his own.  The family afflictions were aggravating the ferocity of Professor Julius von Hartrott.  He was calculating, in a book he was writing, the hundreds of thousands of millions that Germany must exact after her triumph, and the various nations that she would have to annex to the Fatherland.