It was a frightful crusade; yet who was to blame for it but the Germans and their own self-advertised frightfulness? The world was fighting for its life and health against a plague, a new outrush from that new plague-spot whence so many floods of barbarism had broken over civilization. They came forth now in gray streams like the torrent of rats that pursued the wicked Bishop Hatto to his tower. Only the world was not Bishop Hatto, and it did not flee. It gathered to one vast circular battle, killing and killing rats upon rats in a frenzy of loathing that grew with the butchery. Countless citizens of German origin fought and died with the Americans, but nobody thought of them as Germans now, and least of all did they so think of themselves. In the mind of the Allied nations, German and vermin were linked in rhyme and reason. It may be unjust and unsympathetic, but the very best people feel it a duty to destroy microbes, insects, and beasts of prey without mercy. The Germans themselves had proclaimed their own nature with pride. Peaceful Belgium--invaded, burned, butchered, ravished, dismantled, mulcted, deported, enslaved--was the first sample of German work. Davidge had hated Germany's part in the war from the first, for the world's sake, for the sake of the little nations trampled and starved and the big nations thrown into desperation, and for the insolence and omnipresence of the German menace--for the land filled with graves, the sea with ships, the air with indiscriminate slaughter. Now it had come straight home to himself. His own ship was assassinated; the hill of wheat she carried had been spilled into the sterile sea. Nearly all of her crew had been murdered or drowned. He had a blood-feud of his own with Germany. He was startled to find Mamise recoiling from him. He looked at her with a sudden demand: "Does it shock you to have me hate 'em?" "No! No, indeed!" she cried. "I wasn't thinking of them, but of you. I never saw you before like this. You scared me a little. I didn't know you could be so angry." "I'm not half as angry as I'd like to be. Don't you abominate 'em, too?" "Oh yes--I wish that Germany were one big ship and all the Germans on board, and I had a torpedo big enough to blast them all to--where they belong." This wish seemed to him to prove a sufficient lack of affection for the Germans, and he added, "Amen!" with a little nervous reaction into uncouth laughter. But this was only another form of his anguish. At such times the distraught soul seems to have need of all its emotions and expressions, and to run among them like a frantic child. Davidge's next mood was a passionate regret for the crew, the dead engineers and sailors shattered and blasted and cast into the sea, the sufferings of the little squad that escaped into a life-boat without water or provisions or shelter from the sun and the lashing spray.