At La Fontenelle, Ban de Sept, and many other villages along the front, manure had been thrown into the wells, the fruit trees were cut down, the copper was taken from coffins of the dead, the farm houses were demolished, and all property was taken away or destroyed. One would not pay $10 for the whole outfit of a peasant farmer’s home: table, a half dozen chairs, a bedstead in the corner, a crucifix hanging on the wall, a marriage certificate and a picture of the virgin, yet all was gone. The ammunition trains that came up from Germany went back loaded with such poor people’s belongings. Nothing left, an old woman’s bonnet on a dung-heap, a baby’s shoe in a corner, a broken picture frame or two—that’s all. Talk about forgiving the Germans! Robbing the poor, the destruction of property, possibly may be forgiven. Property can be replaced. But, the systematic, deliberate ruin of non-combatant, innocent women and children, is a crime against civilization that can never be forgiven or forgotten. For generations to come, the German will be treated as an outlaw. He will be shunned—worse than a beast. Unclean, he will have to purge himself before he may be again accepted in the society of decent women and men. Think of those fine-grained, sensitive French girls, compelled to live with brutes—generally surly, often drunk, who have killed their husbands, their brothers, their fathers! They have broken all the rules of war. They have outraged every decency. They are so sunk in the abyss of shame that they know neither respect for the living nor reverence for the dead. CHAPTER XVIII LOVE AND WAR Love and war go together. War destroys the body but love lives on with the soul. Love and war have transformed the hitherto seemingly empty-pated, fashionable woman to an angel of mercy. Socialists have developed into patriots, artisans have become statesmen, good-for-nothings are now heroes, misers have grown to be philanthropists. Man, missing woman’s ministrations at the front, turns instinctively to her when opportunity offers. Hard, fierce, unyielding to his fellows, he relaxes in her sheltering affection. He is but a boy grown. He wants to be petted, coddled, civilized again. The woman realizes he has suffered for her. He knows what she has sacrificed for him. War has brought them together, brushed aside false pride and hypocrisy and revealed refreshing springs of patriotism and love out of which flows a union of hearts and hopes that only those who suffer, sacrifice and endure together can realize.