When he was gone she still stood there, her chin on her breast--she who cared for nothing, believed in nothing--with the sound in her ears of cheering, of hurrying feet, and voices; stood, in the centre of a pattern made by fragments of the torn-up notes, staring out into the moonlight, seeing, not this hated room and the hated square outside, but a German orchard, and herself, a little girl, plucking apples, a big dog beside her; a hundred other pictures, too, such as the drowning see. Her heart swelled; she sank down on the floor, laid her forehead on the dusty carpet, and pressed her body to it. She who did not care--who despised all peoples, even her own--began, mechanically, to sweep together the scattered fragments of the notes, assembling them with the dust into a little pile, as of fallen leaves, and dabbling in it with her fingers, while the tears ran down her cheeks. For her country she had torn them, her country in defeat! She, who had just one shilling in this great town of enemies, who wrung her stealthy living out of the embraces of her foes! And suddenly in the moonlight she sat up and began to sing with all her might--"_Die Wacht am Rhein_." 1916. III FLOTSAM AND JETSAM A REMINISCENCE The tides of the war were washing up millions of wrecked lives on all the shores; what mattered the flotsam of a conscripted deep-sea Breton fisherman, slowly pining away for lack of all he was accustomed to; or the jetsam of a tall glass-blower from the 'invaded countries,' drifted into the hospital--no one quite knew why--prisoner for twenty months with the Boches, released at last because of his half-paralysed tongue--What mattered they? What mattered anything, or any one, in days like those? Corporal Mignan, wrinkling a thin, parchmenty face, full of suffering and kindly cynicism, used to call them '_mes deux phénomènes_.' Riddled to the soul by gastritis, he must have found them trying roommates, with the tricks and manners of sick and naughty children towards a long-suffering nurse. To understand all is to forgive all, they say; but, though he had suffered enough to understand much, Mignan was tempted at times to deliver judgment--for example, when Roche, the Breton fisherman, rose from his bed more than ten times in the night, and wandered out into the little courtyard of the hospital, to look at the stars, because he could not keep still within four walls--so unreasonable of the '_type_.' Or when Gray, the tall glass-blower--his grandfather had been English--refused with all the tenacity of a British workman to wear an undervest, with the thermometer below zero, Centigrade.