word, "Englisher!" If looks were daggers I should have been pierced
through the heart. Perhaps an English overcoat accounted for her
error. Certainly, I promptly recognized mine when I saw that this was
a Red Cross buffet. An Englishman had dared to try to buy a
sandwich meant for German soldiers! She might at least glory in the
fact that her majestic glare had made me most uncomfortable as I
murmured an apology which she received with a stony frown.

A moment later a soldier approached the buffet. She leaned over,
smiling, as gentle as she had been fierce and malignant a moment
before, making a picture, as she put some mustard on a sandwich for
him, which recalled that of the Frenchwoman among the wounded in
the freight shed at Calais--a simile which would anger them both.

The Frenchwoman, too, had a Red Cross uniform; she, too,
expressed the mercy and gentle ministration which we like to
associate with woman. But there was the difference of the old culture
and the new; of the race which was fighting to have and the race
which was fighting to hold. The tactics which we call the offensive was
in the German woman's, as in every German's, nature. It had been in
the Frenchwoman's in Napoleon's time. Many racial hates the war
has developed; but that of the German is a seventeen-inch-howitzer,
asphyxiating-gas hate.

If hates help to win, why not hate as hard as you can? Don't you go to
war to win? There is no use talking of sporting rules and saying that
this and that is "not done" in humane circles--win! The Germans
meant to win. Always I thought of them as having the spirit of the
Middle Ages in their hearts, organized for victory by every modern
method. Three strata of civilization were really fighting, perhaps: The