“Look here, lads, I can’t listen to this chap any longer; I’m going to fetch him in.” Then the soldier had climbed over the top and dragged him down to the British trench; but in doing so he had himself been potted. The British lads had put them both into a dug-out, lying side by side, and when their advance began they had gone on and left them. How long they lay together Oskar’s schoolfellow did not know. When he came to himself he had found he was getting better, but his companion was fatally wounded. At length the brave fellow (he was a lieutenant) had tugged at his pocket, and dragged out his watch and said: “Look here, Fritz old chap, if you live to go home send this to my sister; she lives at Knockaloe.” Mona tosses in bed all that night, gazing into the darkness with terror, after she has drawn her curtains close to shut out the light of the arc-lamps. Remembering what her father had said when she read the soldier boy’s letter, she had not shown the watch to her father, but hidden it away in a drawer. It had come to her like a reproach from the dead, and she was afraid to look at it. All at once she asks herself _why_? If those two brave boys lying out there in that deserted dug-out, the one thinking of his sister at Knockaloe and the other of his mother in her German home, could be friends at the last, was it the devil that had made them so? “Oh God, my God, why do men make wars?” _SIXTH CHAPTER_ Mona knows that this is the beginning of the end. She finds herself thinking of Oskar constantly, and especially when she is dropping off to sleep at night and awakening in the morning. With a hot and quivering heart she asks herself what is to come of it all. She does not know. She dare not think. A feeling of shame and dread seems to clutch her by the throat. One day the neighbouring farmer who comes to visit her father blurts out another of his shocking stories. It is about a mid-day raid over London. Towards noon on a beautiful summer day, in an infant school in East London, a hundred little children, ranging in age from three years to six, had been singing their hymn before the time came to scamper home in childish glee to dinner, when out of the sunshine of the sky two bombs had fallen from a German air-machine and killed ten of them and wounded fifty. The scene had been a frightful shambles. Some of the children had been destroyed beyond all recognition, their sweet limbs being splashed like a bloody avalanche against the broken walls. And when, a moment later, their mothers had come breathless, bare-headed and with wild eyes to the schoolhouse door, they saw the mangled bodies of their little ones brought out in a stream of blood. Mona enters her father’s bedroom just as the babbler is finishing his story. The old man, who is quivering with rage, has struggled to his feet and is stamping his stick on the floor and swearing--nobody ever having heard an oath from his lips before.