FROM MY JOURNAL:
I have just had this conversation with the little French chambermaid at my hotel. "You have not gone to mass, Mademoiselle?"
"I? No."
"But here, so near the lines, I should think—"
"I do not go to church. There is no God." She looked up with
red-rimmed, defiant eyes. "My husband has been killed," she said.
"There is no God. If there was a God, why should my husband be killed?
He had done nothing."
This afternoon at three-thirty I am to start for the front. I am to see everything. The machine leaves the Mairie at three-thirty.
* * * * *
Do you recall the school map on which the state of Texas was always pink and Rhode Island green? And Canada a region without colour, and therefore without existence?
The map of Europe has become a battle line painted in three colours: yellow for the Belgian Army, blue for the British and red for the French. It is really a double line, for the confronting German Army is drawn in black. It is a narrow line to signify what it does—not only death and wanton destruction, but the end of the myth of civilisation; a narrow line to prove that the brotherhood of man is a dream, that modern science is but an improvement on fifth-century barbarity; that right, after all, is only might.
It took exactly twenty-four hours to strip the shirt off the diplomacy of Europe and show the coat of mail underneath.