In the little house of mercy two weeks went by, and then a third.
Soldiers marching out to the trenches sometimes wore flowers tucked
gayly in their caps. More and more Allied aeroplanes were in the
air. Sometimes, standing in the streets, Sara Lee saw one far overhead,
while balloon-shaped clouds of bursting shells hung far below it.
Once or twice in the early morning a German plane, flying so low that
one could easily see the black cross on each wing, reconnoitered the
village for wagon trains or troops. Always they found it empty.
Hope had almost fled now. In the afternoons Marie went to the ruined
church, and there knelt before the heap of marble and masonry that had
once been the altar, and prayed. And Sara Lee, who had been brought up
a Protestant and had never before entered a Catholic church, took to
going there too. In some strange fashion the peace of former days
seemed to cling to the little structure, roofless as it was. On quiet
days its silence was deeper than elsewhere. On days of much firing the
sound from within its broken walls seemed deadened, far away.
Marie burned a candle as she prayed, for that soul in purgatory which she
had once loved, and now pitied. Sara Lee burned no candle, but she
knelt, sometimes beside Marie, sometimes alone, and prayed for many
things: that Henri should be living, somewhere; that the war might end;
that that day there would be little wounding; that some day the Belgians
might go home again; and that back in America Harvey might grow to
understand and forgive her. And now and then she looked into the very
depths of her soul, and on those days she prayed that her homeland
might, before it was too late, see this thing as she was seeing it. The
wanton waste of it all, the ghastly cruelty the Germans had brought into
this war.
Sara Lee's vague thinking began to crystallize. This war was not
a judgment sent from on high to a sinful world. It was the wicked
imposition of one nation on other nations. It was national. It was
almost racial. But most of all it was a war of hate on the German
side. She had never believed in hate. There were ugly passions in the
world--jealousy, envy, suspicion; but not hate. The word was not in her
rather limited vocabulary.
There was no hate on the part of the men she knew. The officers who
stopped in on their way to and from the trenches were gentlemen and
soldiers. They were determined and grave; they resented, they even
loathed. But they did not hate. The little Belgian soldiers were
bewildered, puzzled, desperately resentful. But of hate, as translated
into terms of frightfulness, they had no understanding.