I


OFF TO WAR

The time was late in the autumn of the second year of the war; the
place, the garden of a war hospital in a small Austrian town, which lay
at the base of wooded hills, sequestered as behind a Spanish wall, and
still preserving its sleepy contented outlook upon existence.

Day and night the locomotives whistled by. Some of them hauled to the
front trains of soldiers singing and hallooing, high-piled bales of hay,
bellowing cattle and ammunition in tightly-closed, sinister-looking
cars. The others, in the opposite direction, came creeping homeward
slowly, marked by the bleeding cross that the war has thrown upon all
walls and the people behind them. But the great madness raced through
the town like a hurricane, without disturbing its calm, as though the
low, brightly colored houses with the old-fashioned ornate facades had
tacitly come to the sensible agreement to ignore with aristocratic
reserve this arrogant, blustering fellow, War, who turned everything
topsy-turvy.

In the parks the children played unmolested with the large russet leaves
of the old chestnut trees. Women stood gossiping in front of the shops,
and somewhere in every street a girl with a bright kerchief on her head
could be seen washing windows. In spite of the hospital flags waving
from almost every house, in spite of innumerable bulletin boards,
notices and sign-posts that the intruder had thrust upon the defenseless
town, peace still seemed to prevail here, scarcely fifty miles away from