"Good God!" exclaimed the lady, after a period of serious thought. "Have we come to that?"
I assured her that the situation was not as alarming as it looked. In the end the healthy constitution would adjust itself to the shortage in alimentation. No fit adult would perish by it, though it would be hard on persons over fifty years of age. There could be no doubt that many of them would die of malnutrition before the war was over. Babies, also, would cease to live in large numbers if their diet had to be similarly restricted.
The smell had a repellent effect upon the woman. I met her many times after that and learned that it was haunting her. Her desire to keep it out of her palatial residence caused her to pay particular attention to the food of her servants. The case was most interesting to me. I had sat for days and nights in the trenches on Gallipoli, among thousands of unburied dead, and there was little that could offend my olfactory nerves after that, if indeed it had been possible before, seeing that I had for many weary months followed the revolutions in Mexico. Thus immune to the effects of the condition in question, I was able to watch closely a very interesting psychological phenomenon.
I found that it was torture for the woman to get near a crowd of underfed people. She began to shrink at their very sight.
"I take it that you fear death very much, madame," I said, one day.
"I dread the very thought of it," was the frank reply.
"But why should you?" I asked. "It is a perfectly natural condition."
"But an unjust one," came the indignant answer.
"Nothing in nature is unjust," I said. "Nature knows neither right nor wrong. If she did, she would either cease to produce food altogether for your people and state, or she would produce all the more—if war can be laid at the door of nature in arguments of right and wrong."
"But that has nothing to do with the smell—that awful smell," insisted the woman.