She turned her gray eyes on him. “I will tell you: in that dreadful moment when the cavalry of France cheered Death in his own awful presence, I loved them and their country—my country!—as I had never loved in all my life.... And I hated, too! I hated the 104 men who butchered them—more!—I hated the country where the men came from; I hated race and country and the blows they dealt, and the evil they wrought on France—my France! That is the truth; and I realize it!”
There was a silence; Buckhurst slowly unrolled the wrinkled paper he had been fingering.
“And now?” he asked, simply.
“Now?” she repeated. “I don’t know—truly, I do not know.” She turned to me sorrowfully. “I had long since thought that my heart was clean of hate, and now I don’t know.” And, to Buckhurst, again: “Our creed teaches us that war is vile—a savage betrayal of humanity by a few dominant minds; a dishonorable ingratitude to God and country. But from that window I saw men die for honor of France with God’s name on their lips. I saw one superb cuirassier, trapped down there in the street, sit still on his horse, while they shot at him from every window, and I heard him call up to a Prussian officer who had just fired at him: ‘My friend, you waste powder; the heart of France is cuirassed by a million more like me!’” A rich flush touched her face; her gray eyes grew brighter.
“Is there a Frenchwoman alive whose blood would not stir at such a scene?” she said. “They shot him through his armor, his breastplate was riddled, he clung to his horse, always looking up at the riflemen, and I heard the bullets drumming on his helmet and his cuirass like hailstones on a tin roof, and I could not look away. And all the while he was saying, quietly: ‘It is quite useless, friends; France lives! You waste your powder!’ and I could not look away or close my eyes—”
She bent her head, shivering, and her interlocked fingers whitened. 105
“I only know this,” she said: “I will give all I have—I will give my poor self to help the advent of that world-wide brotherhood which must efface national frontiers and end all war in this sad world. But if you ask me, in the presence of war, to look on with impartiality, to watch my own country battling for breath, to stop my ears when a wounded mother-land is calling, to answer the supreme cry of France with a passionless cry, ‘Repent!’ I cannot do it—I will not! I was not born to!”
Deeply moved, she had risen, confronting Buckhurst, whose stone-cold eyes were fixed on her.
“You say I hold you unworthy,” she said. “Others may hold me, too, unworthy because I have not reached that impartial equipoise whence, impassive, I can balance my native land against its sins and watch blind justice deal with it all unconcerned.
“In theory I have done it—oh, it is simple to teach one’s soul in theory! But when my eyes saw my own land blacken and shrivel like a green leaf in the fire, and when with my own eyes I saw the best, the noblest, the crown of my country’s chivalry fall rolling in the mud of Morsbronn under the feet of Prussia, every drop of blood in my body was French—hot and red and French! And it is now; and it will always be—as it has always been, though I did not understand.”