He had partaken of the tragic, senseless exaltation that able-bodied men everywhere were experiencing on starting for the front.... Then deliverance from the carping tongue of Mizzi; the simplest things more and more caused her to fly unexpectedly up in the air like a rocket; there would be a sputtering and something would darken and go out. These were among the reasons why Hermann had settled back in the motor that day and with a laugh set out for the front. But there was something else that none of them had known about, that then, that now, was always in his mind, in his heart, in every fibre of his being. Even when he was watching the most indifferent things, such as the buffet Fräulein that very morning,--he didn't need to be alone--suddenly _she_ would be with him and fling her lost radiance around him once again, and wrap him up into that magnetic world of longing for the might have been. He wouldn't hear the "wer giebt," "Pagat," "an' dreier" of the Tarok players, or the rustling of newspapers being turned on their sticks, or the "Sie, Ober," or the "Pikkolo, du dummer,"--_she_ was always more real than anything else, ... even at the café, when he would be holding the _Neue Freie Presse_ and pretending to read. She was everywhere and all. Even as he dropped back in that chair, with Tante Ilde's touch still warm upon his arm and his eyes apparently fixed on the quite uninteresting enlarged and colored photograph of Mizzi's dead father, (Mizzi, year by year was getting to be his very image, with that hint of moustache) he was thinking only of her--Marie. * * * * * That January of 1915, one windy, icy twilight, he had had a hurry call from the Elizabethspital and had put off many patients still waiting and closed his office. Before he got to the gate of the hospital grounds, out in the street even, he found row upon row of stretchers laid down low upon the earth, bearing shattered forms whose silence was more terrible than groans; their grey cloaks were wrapped about them, their poor boots, in which they had marched to destruction at the word of command, were mostly tied to the handles.... Pale faces, bandaged heads, arms crossed on their breasts or inert by their sides, under their capes.... Raised but a foot from the ground where the stretcher bearers had deposited them they looked already like their own graves, as grey, as voiceless. Yet the biting cold of that windy twilight was heavily charged with their unuttered groans. Within the hospital it was still the same. The corridors were blocked. Outside the douche rooms they waited for their turn. At last clean, sheet-covered, they waited again at the door of the operating room.