Marie burned a candle as she prayed, for that soul in purgatory which she had once loved, and now pitied.  Sara Lee burned no candle, but she knelt, sometimes beside Marie, sometimes alone, and prayed for many things:  that Henri should be living, somewhere; that the war might end; that that day there would be little wounding; that some day the Belgians might go home again; and that back in America Harvey might grow to understand and forgive her.  And now and then she looked into the very depths of her soul, and on those days she prayed that her homeland might, before it was too late, see this thing as she was seeing it.  The wanton waste of it all, the ghastly cruelty the Germans had brought into this war.

Sara Lee’s vague thinking began to crystallize.  This war was not a judgment sent from on high to a sinful world.  It was the wicked imposition of one nation on other nations.  It was national.  It was almost racial.  But most of all it was a war of hate on the German side.  She had never believed in hate.  There were ugly passions in the world —­jealousy, envy, suspicion; but not hate.  The word was not in her rather limited vocabulary.

There was no hate on the part of the men she knew.  The officers who stopped in on their way to and from the trenches were gentlemen and soldiers.  They were determined and grave; they resented, they even loathed.  But they did not hate.  The little Belgian soldiers were bewildered, puzzled, desperately resentful.  But of hate, as translated into terms of frightfulness, they had no understanding.

Yet from the other side were coming methods of war so wantonly cruel, so useless save as inflicting needless agony, as only hate could devise.  No strategic value justified them.  They were spontaneous outgrowths of venom, nursed during the winter deadlock and now grown to full size and destructive power.

The rumor of a gas that seared and killed came to the little house as early as February.  In March there came the first victims, poor writhing creatures, deprived of the boon of air, their seared lungs collapsed and agonized, their faces drawn into masks of suffering.  Some of them died in the little house, and even after death their faces held the imprint of horror.

To Sara Lee, burying her own anxiety under the cloak of service, there came new and terrible thoughts.  This was not war.  The Germans had sent their clouds of poisoned gas across the inundation, but had made no attempt to follow.  This was killing, for the lust of killing; suffering, for the joy of inflicting pain.

And a day or so later she heard of The Hague Convention.  She had not known of it before.  Now she learned of that gentlemen’s agreement among nations, and that it said:  “The use of poison or of poisoned weapons is forbidden.”  She pondered that carefully, trying to think dispassionately.  Now and then she received a copy of a home newspaper, and she saw that the use of poison gases was being denied by Germans in America and set down to rumor and hysteria.