"How excellently the gracious young lady speaks German! She lived, without doubt, for many years in my country?" he said.
"I was at school in Berlin for two years," Muriel told him, using as friendly a tone as if she were speaking to one of our own naval men. "Berlin was delightful, I thought, before the war! Charming! As long as I live I shall always remember the smell of the Berlin 'Conditoreien'—such heavenly confectioners' shops! As you went by, you always got a whiff of very good cigars mixed with the smell of boiling-hot chocolate; delicious!"
She went on chattering, as she always did seem able to chatter to men, freely and easily. Whether they were Huns or South Sea Islanders, as Mrs. Price put it, men would be men to Muriel Elvey—that is, the atoms which made up the atmosphere of admiration that was her breath of life!
"Berlin and the Tiergarten and the All-darlingest Opera! How I did enjoy them all," Muriel gushed in German. "I did have a good time; at the houses of my school-fellows where I was invited—everybody was so charming and hospitable to me!"
"That is—yes—very understandable," put in the Hun sailor, with a bolder glance. "They who would not be charming to such a charming young English lady must indeed without taste be!"
Muriel, swinging her parasol, smiled graciously upon this compliment—from a German!
Standing there in that Welsh cornfield, watching this little interlude between that captured Hun and that pretty English girl, I couldn't help remembering the fate of other pretty girls, in countries less fortunate than ours, laid waste by these men.
Rosy girls of Flanders, neat black-haired girls of France, have been driven off into slavery and worse under the rule of the Germans.
Germans would have done the same by the girls of Great Britain! Think of it. Had their long-laid plans succeeded for the invasion of this coveted country of ours, our women—always made much of in the old days by Germans!—our women would have been part of "the loot of cities." Men like these in this very field would have treated Muriel Elvey, me, all of us! no differently from the way in which they treated the girls of Lille. England's women!
They would never be able to do it now. For that we had our fighting men, our unsleeping Fleet, to thank.