"It is Hans who has the heart full of sentiment," she said. "When he saw that the French spy was a girl of such beauty and such youth he believed that she should not be punished, and he a good German! Ah, all men are alike!"
Hans filled his pipe and wisely made no reply. But John smiled also.
"Is it wicked in a man to have an eye for beauty?" he said. "I know that my host's heart has thrilled many a time when he caught a glimpse of the lady who is now his wife and the very competent head of his household."
"Hans is not so bad," said the hausfrau complacently, and John's compliment won him an unusually good room that night. Hans told him also that he could probably secure him a place in an empty supply wagon the next morning, and John was grateful. Walking was good, and it had done much to maintain his strength and steady his nerves, but one could not walk all the way across Germany.
He was aware that he was surrounded by dangers but he felt that the omens remained fair. Perhaps the good wishes that had been given to him still clothed him about and protected him from harm. In abnormal times the human mind seeks more than an ordinary faith.
He would have slept well, but in the night an army passed. For hours and hours the gray legions trod by in numbers past counting, the moonlight casting gleams upon the spiked helmets. Then came masses of Uhlans and hussars and after them batteries of great guns and scores and scores of the wicked machine guns. Truly, as the priest had said, the whole world had gone mad. He remembered those days in Vienna when the gay and light-head ed Viennese had marched up and down the streets all night long, singing and dancing, and thinking only of war as a festival, in which glorious victory was sure and quick. Torrents of blood had flowed under the bridges since then, gay Austria, that had set the torch, had been shaken to its foundation, and no victory was yet in sight for anybody.
Nevertheless the German legions seemed inexhaustible. John had seen them turned back in those long days of fighting on the Marne, and more than a million had been killed or wounded since the war began, but that avalanche of men and guns still poured out of the heart of Germany. He felt more deeply than ever that the world could not afford a German victory, and the sanguinary spectacle of a Kaiser riding roughshod over civilization. The fact that so many German people were likable and that Germany had achieved so much made the case all the worse.