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Kings, Queens and Pawns - An American Woman at the Front by Mary Roberts Rinehart
page 46 of 375 (12%)
and everything to lose.

He had lost. The ambulance moved away.

I was frequently in La Panne after that day. I got to know well the
road from Dunkirk, with its bordering of mud and ditch, its heavy
transports, its grey gunboats in the canals that followed it on one
side, its long lines of over-laden soldiers, its automobiles that
travelled always at top speed. I saw pictures that no artist will ever
paint--of horrors and beauties, of pathos and comedy; of soldiers
washing away the filth of the trenches in the cold waters of canals
and ditches; of refugees flying by day from the towns, and returning
at night to their ruined houses to sleep in the cellars; of long
processions of Spahis, Arabs from Algeria, silhouetted against the
flat sky line against a setting sun, their tired horses moving slowly,
with drooping heads, while their riders, in burnoose and turban, rode
with loose reins; of hostile aƫroplanes sailing the afternoon breeze
like lazy birds, while shells from the anti-aircraft guns burst
harmlessly below them in small balloon-shaped clouds of smoke.

But never in all that time did I overcome the sense of unreality, and
always I was obsessed by the injustice, the wanton waste and cost and
injustice of it all. The baby at La Panne--why should it go through
life on stumps instead of legs? The boyish officer--why should he have
died? The little sixteen-year-old soldier who had been blinded and who
sat all day by the phonograph, listening to Madame Butterfly,
Tipperary, and Harry Lauder's A Wee Deoch-an'-Doris--why should he
never see again what I could see from the window beside him, the
winter sunset over the sea, the glistening white of the sands, the
flat line of the surf as it crept in to the sentries' feet? Why? Why?
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