impatient scorn, and Georg Zottmyer grinding his teeth in the trenches
and suffering acutely from dyspepsia.

Until the summer of 1916 she was very busy, either in her mother's
hospital or in one in Munich run by a group of Socialist friends under
Marie von Erkel. She glanced at the English papers sometimes, but
assumed that their versions of the war's origin, and of Germanic
methods, were for home effect, and smiled at their occasional claims of
victory.

Poor things! By this time she had seen so much mortal suffering, soothed
so many dying men who raved of unimaginable horrors, written so many
pathetic last letters to mothers and wives and sweethearts, that the
first mood of fury and hatred had long since passed. Her mind, normally
clear, acute, just, regained its poise. Moreover, those five years
preceding the war, during which she had learned to use her gifts for the
benefit of her sex instead of for her own amusement and fame, played
their insidious part.

When she was ordered to take charge of a hospital in Lille in June of
the second year of the war she had forced herself to accept the present
state of Europe with a certain philosophy. After all, war was its
normal, its historic, condition. Following a somewhat unusual interval
of peace, owing to the beneficent reign of the German Emperor, the war
microbes of Europe, cultured in the Balkan swamps, had, through some
miscalculation, after a deplorable assassination, ravaged the entire
continent instead of being localized as heretofore. Men were men and
kings were kings and war was war. Gisela sometimes wondered if the
hideous upheaval were anybody's fault, if the desire to fight had not
been more or less simultaneous in spite of the fact that Germany was