When the hymn comes to an end Mona sits and the pastor begins his sermon. She can understand only a word of it now and again, and her eyes wander to the door. Oskar is there. His head is up and his eyes are shining. “O Lord, stop the war, stop it, stop it!” Summer has come again; the sun rises and sets, the birds sing and nest, the landscape preserves its solemn peace, but still the war goes on. The last kick of the enemy, which the Swiss doctors had foreseen, has been made and it is over. After a devastating advance, there has been a still more devastating retreat. The prisoners in the camp know all about it. Their spirits had risen and fallen according to the fortunes of their armies at the front. At first they were truculent. They talked braggingly about vast German forces marching upon London, blowing up Buckingham Palace, putting an end to the British Empire, and then turning their attention to America. Afterwards they were sceptical. If the English newspapers reported German defeats they knew better, having received their German newspapers which reported German victories. Now they are sullen. What is the war about, anyway? Nothing at all! In ten years’ time nobody will know what was the cause of it! Mona is in a fever of excitement. Is the war coming to an end at last? What does Oskar think? Why doesn’t he come to her? Is he still thinking he has brought trouble enough on her already? At length he comes. It is late at night. She hears his voice calling to her in a tremulous tone from the other side of the open door. “Mona!” He has never called her by that name before. “Yes?” She is standing on the threshold, trembling from head to foot, never before having been face to face with him since the night of her father’s seizure. “It’s all over, Mona.” “What is, Oskar?” “Germany is beaten. The Hindenburg line is broken, and revolution has begun in Berlin.” “Does that mean that the war will soon be at an end?” “It must be.” She hesitates for a moment, then she says, with a quivering at her heart: “But surely you are glad of that, Oskar--that the war will soon be at an end?” He looks into her face and then turns away his own. “I don’t know. I can’t say,” he answers. She looks after him as he goes off. Her eyes gleam and her heart throbs. _TENTH CHAPTER_ The tenth of November, nineteen hundred and eighteen. All day long there has been great commotion in the officers’ quarters. The telephone with Government Office has been going constantly since early morning, and there has been much hurrying to and fro. An internment camp is like a desert in one thing--rumour passes over it on the wings of the wind. Before midday every prisoner knows everything. The Kaiser has been hurled from his throne by his own people; the German command have asked for an armistice, and the Allied Commander-in-Chief has given them until nine o’clock to-morrow to sign the terms of peace he has prepared for them.