She stopped and looked at them deeply, her strong, ugly face, white with intensity. “A vow, my friends, a vow from every one of us, by what she holds most sacred, that she will summon all her strength to give of her very best for the common good. In the name of our love for those we have left--” her voice broke, and she could not go on. She lifted her hand silently and held it up, her eyes fixed on them. The other hands went up, the drawn faces steadied, the quivering hearts, centered each on its own suffering, calmed by taking thought for others. The very air in the barrack-room seemed less stifling. The two German guards looked on, astonished by the incomprehensible ceremony. These scattered, half-dead women, flung into the room like cattle, who had not seemed to know each other, all at once to be one unit! Octavie drew a long breath. Then, homely, familiar, coherent as though she were giving a preliminary explanation to a class at the beginning of a school-year, “Now let us understand clearly what is happening to us, so that we can defend ourselves against it. What is it that is being done to us? An attempt is being made to break us down, physically and morally. But these people around us here are not the ones who wish this; they are not as intelligent as we; and they haven’t half the personal incentive to accomplish it, that we have to prevent it. We have a thousand resources of ingenuity that they can’t touch at all. “We must begin by economizing every atom possible of our strength, moral and physical. And we can start on that right now by not wasting any more strength hating our guards as we have all been hating the Germans who have had to touch us, so far. We can think of them as demons and infernal forces of evil and make them into horrors that will shadow our every thought. Or we can look straight at them to see what they are, and disregard them, just leave them out of our moral lives, when we see that they are ordinary men, for the most part coarse and common men, and now forced to be abnormal, forced by others into a situation that develops every germ of brutality in them.” At this, young Mme. Baudoin spoke out and told of the German guard who had wept when her little boy was dragged away; and, “I’d rather be in my shoes than his,” cried Octavie vigorously.