Brand and I went into a little shop to buy a toothbrush.
The woman behind the counter talked about the war.
“It was due to the wickedness of great people,” she said. “There are many people who grew rich out of the war. They wanted it to go on and on so that they could get more rich. They gorged themselves while the poor starved. It was the poor who were robbed of their life-blood.”
She did not speak passionately, but with a dull kind of anger.
“My own life-blood was taken,”, she said presently, after wrapping up the tooth-brush. “First they took Hans, my eldest. He was killed almost at once—at Liège. Then they took my second-born, Friedrich. He was killed at Ypres. Next, Wilhelm died—in hospital at Brussels. He had both his legs blown off. Last they took little Karl, my youngest. He was killed by an air-bomb, far behind the lines, near Valenciennes.”
A tear splashed on the bit of paper in which she had wrapped the tooth-brush. She wiped it away with her apron.
“My man and I are now alone,” she said, handing us the packet. “We are too old to have more children. We sit and talk of our sons who are dead, and wonder why God did not stop the war.”
“It is sad,” said Brand. He could find nothing else to say. Not with this woman could he argue about German guilt.
“Ja, es ist traurig.”
She took the money with a “Danke schön.”