could get more rich. They gorged themselves while the poor starved. It was the poor who were robbed of their life-blood."
She did not speak passionately, but with a dull kind of anger.
"My own life-blood was taken," she said presently, after wrapping up the toothbrush. "First they took Hans, my eldest. He was killed almost at once—at Liège. Then they took my second-born, Friedrich. He was killed at Ypers . Next, Wilhelm died—in hospital at Brussels. He had both his legs blown off. Last they took little Karl, my youngest. He was killed by an air-*bomb, far behind the lines, near Valenciennes."
A tear splashed on the bit of paper in which she had wrapped the toothbrush. She wiped it away with her apron.
"My man and I are now alone,' she said, handing us the packet. "We are too old to have more children. We sit and talk of our sons who are dead, and wonder why God did not stop the war."
"It is sad," said Brand. He could find nothing else to say. Not with this woman could he argue about German guilt.
"Ja, es ist traurig."
She took the money, with a "Danke schön."
In the town of Mürren I spent some time with Brand and others in the barracks where a number of trench-mortars and machine-guns were being handed over by German officers according to the terms of the Armistice. The officers were mostly young men, extremely polite, anxious to save us any kind of trouble, marvellous in their concealment of any kind of humiliation they may have felt—must have felt—in this delivery of arms. They were confused only for one moment, and that was when a boy with a wheelbarrow trundled by with a load
