one's mind.

I certainly prayed that the commandant was getting a better night
than mine, as I lay there staring up at the electric light with a
hundred hates and fears pounding through my brain. "I'm a
prisoner," was one thought. "Supposing the silence of the guns
means that the Germans, beaten, are being pressed back into
Brussels by the Allies. They may let us go. No, the Germans,
maddened by defeat, might order us all to be shot," was one idea.
"How does it feel to be blindfolded and stood up against a wall by a
firing squad?" was another pleasant companion idea that kept vigil
with me through the midnight hours. Then my fancies took a
frenzied turn, "Suppose these be brutes of soldiers and they run
us through, saying we were trying to escape."

"Escape!" The word no sooner leaped into my mind than an
almost uncontrollable impulse to escape seized me, or at least I
thought one had. I got upon my feet, observing that the two
soldiers lying beside me on the floor were fast asleep and the
guards at the outer door were nodding. I stepped over their
sleeping forms arid made a reconnoiter of the hallway. There in the
semi-darkness stood seven soldiers of the Kaiser with their seven
guns and their seven glistening bayonets.

Cold steel is not supposed to act as a soothing syrup; but one
glance at those bayonets and my uncontrollable impulse utterly
vanished. You will observe that the bayonet is continually cropping
up in my story. It does, indeed. A bayonet looks far different from
what it did on dress parade. Meet one in war, and its true
significance first dawns upon you. It is not simply a decoration at