No meat that day, no cheese either, except for the household. She could, not even give me bread without a bread-ticket—nothing but diluted beer.
Before the war business had been good. Then came one misfortune after another. Her husband was a prisoner in Russia, and her eldest son had died with von Kluck's Army almost in sight of the Eiffel Tower.
"You must find it hard to get along," I said.
"I do," she sighed. "But, then, when fodder got scarce we killed all the pigs, so bother with them is over now."
"You are not downhearted about the war?" I asked.
"I know that Germany cannot be defeated," she replied. "But we do so long for peace."
"You do not think your Government responsible at all for the war?"
I ventured.
"I don't, and the rest of us do not," was her unhesitating reply. "We all know that our Kaiser wanted only peace. Everybody knows that England caused all this misery." Then she looked squarely and honestly into my eyes and said in a tone I shall never forget: "Do you think that if our Government were responsible for the war that we should be willing to bear all these terrible sacrifices?"
I thought of that banquet table more than two years before, and the remark about creating public opinion. I realised that the road is long which winds from it to the little wayside inn near Hildesheim, but that it is a road on which live both the diplomat and the lonely, war-weary woman. They live on different ends, that is all.