Another of those tragic tales of love in wartime — amor inter arma. The affair had begun when Kurt lay in hospital after his second wounding, some pieces of his ribs torn out by a shell fragment.
“It was a small town near the eastern border,” said the officer. “The front had shifted back and forth, so there was a lot of wreckage and suffering. The nurse who took care of me was about a year younger than I, a fine, straight girl — her father was a schoolteacher, and poor, so she had been obliged to work for her education. I'd got a touch of gangrene, so I had a long period of convalescence and saw a great deal of her, and we fell in love. You know how it is in wartime — ”
Kurt was looking at Beauty, who nodded. Yes, she knew! Lanny said: “The same thing happened to Rick. Only it wasn't a nurse.”
“Indeed! I must hear about that. Well, I was going back to duty and the time was short, so I married her. I didn't tell my parents, because, as you know, we pay a good deal of attention to social status in Germany, and my parents wouldn't have considered it a suitable match. My father was ill with influenza and my mother was under heavy strain, so I just sent my father's lawyer a sealed letter, to be opened in the event of my death, and I let the matter rest there until the war was over. Elsa wouldn't give up her duties as nurse, even though she was pregnant; and in the last weeks of the war she collapsed from undernourishment. So you see this blockade meant something personal to me.”
Kurt stopped. His face was drawn, which made him look old; but he gave no other sign of emotion. “There wasn't enough food for anybody, unless it was speculators who broke the law. Elsa kept the truth from me, and the result was the baby was born dead, and she died of hemorrhages a few days later. So that's all there was to my marriage.”
Beauty sat with a mist of tears in her eyes; and Lanny was thinking a familiar thought: “Oh, what a wicked thing is war!” He had lived through the agony of France with Marcel and his mother, and the agony of Britain with Rick and Nina; now in Germany it was the same. The younger man, thinking always of patching matters up between his two friends, remarked: “Nobody has gained anything, Kurt. Rick is crippled for life and is seldom out of pain. He crashed in a plane.”
“Poor fellow!” said the other; but his voice sounded dull. “At least that was in a fight. His wife hasn't died of starvation, has she?”
“The British had their food restrictions, don't forget. Your submarine campaign was effective. Both sides were using whatever weapons they had. Now we're trying to make peace.”
“What they call peace is to be just another kind of war. They are taking our ships and railroad stock, our horses and cattle, and saddling us with debts enough to last a century.”
“We are trying to make a League of Nations,” pleaded the American; “one that will guarantee the peace.”