Then the world was torn in two. The earth dripped in blood and sorrow.
Life became more difficult than on the frontier, and more elemental. I
was present, in the first year of the war, in a house where the King and
Queen of the Belgians were guests, where great generals and great
statesmen had gathered on great and earnest and desperate business. I
was only an onlooker, and I noticed what every one else was too absorbed
to see. As the evening progressed, I realized that pomp and ceremony
had died with the youth of France. King, generals, statesmen met as
human men pitting their wits against one another, desperately struggling
to find a way out of the hell into which they were falling.

Twice the king rose to his feet, and no one else stood. They were all
too deep in the terrible question of war.

When the meeting was over and the guests of the house ready to retire,
the little queen said very quietly: "Madam, may not my husband and I
occupy this room together? It is very kind of you to arrange two suites
for us, but I am sure there are many guests here to-night--and, anyway,
I prefer to be near him."

The war had done that. Who would expect a queen to think of the
problems of housing guests, even a great queen? And the war had made
the king not the king, but her man, very near and very dear.

Many other conventions I saw die by the way as the war progressed. Then
America came in.

There is a temptation to talk about America in the war, but, after all,