And the Governor is answering: “All the same, we should be fools to trust those traitors again. We have beaten the German brutes, and what we have got to do now is to keep them beaten.” “I’m not like that, your Excellency,” says the Commandant. “I’ll fight my enemy with the best, but when the fighting is over I want to forget and, if I can, forgive. I was at the front in the early days, and after a bad bit of an engagement I came upon a German officer in a shell hole. He was in a terrible state, poor fellow, and we couldn’t take him in, so I decided to stay with him. His mind was perfectly clear, and he said, ‘Colonel’ (I was colonel in those days), ‘don’t you think this is strange?’ ‘What’s strange?’ I asked. ‘Well,’ said he, ‘if you and I had met in the trenches I suppose you would have tried to kill me for the sake of Motherland, and I should have tried to kill you for the sake of Fatherland, yet here you are trying to save me for the sake of ... Brotherland.’ More of the same kind he said in those last hours, and when the end came he was in my arms and his head was on my breast, and I don’t mind telling you I ... kissed him.” Mona felt a thrill going through and through her. Brotherland! That was what all the world would be soon. And then Oskar and she, living in Liverpool, in their great love would be happy and unashamed. That night Oskar comes back. His face is pale and his lips are quivering. He tries to speak, but finding it hard to do so he hands her a letter. It is from the engineering firm on the Mersey. SIR,--We have received your letter of the 10th inst. addressed to our late chairman, who died during the war, and regret to say in reply to your request that you should be taken back in your former position, that it is now filled to our satisfaction by another engineer, and that even if it were vacant we should find it impossible to re-engage you for the reason that feeling against the Germans is so strong among British workmen that none of them would be willing to serve under you, and the fact that you had married an English wife, as you say, would increase, not lessen, their hostility. Yours, etc. “I wouldn’t have believed it,” says Oskar. “It’s the war,” says Mona. “Will it never, never end?” “Never,” says Oskar, and he turns away with clenched teeth. Mona goes to bed that night with a heavy heart. If English workmen will not work with Oskar, England, also, is closed to them, and Brotherland is a cruel dream. Another week passes. The disbanding of the camp goes on as usual, with its toll of two hundred and fifty men daily. The Fourth and Second Compounds are now beginning to be called upon. The men of the Third are being kept to the last, because many of them, like Oskar, are engineers, and therefore useful in removing the electric plant, which is to be sold separately. But their turn will come soon and then ... what _then?_