“What a splendid fellow your brother must have been,” says Oskar.
Mona gasps. All her pride and defiance seem to be stricken out of her in a moment.
The English newspapers continue to come, and one evening, in the midst of reports of indescribable German barbarities, Mona finds a letter from an English soldier to his family telling of a good act by an enemy. He had been wounded in an engagement in Belgium and, left all day for dead on the battlefield, he had crawled at night on his stomach over half a mile of churned-up land to a lonely farmhouse, being drawn to it by a dim light in a window. The farmer had turned out to be an old German, but he had been “a white man” for all that, and though some of the officers of the victorious German army were even then drinking and singing and making merry in his front parlour, he had smuggled the wounded British lad into his cellar, and helped him to escape in the morning.
Some dizzy impulse, vaguely associated with misty thoughts of Oskar, causes Mona to carry the newspaper upstairs and to read the boy’s letter to her father.
“So there’s good and bad in all races, you see. That old German farmer must be a good creature,” she says. Whereupon the old man, who has pulled himself up in bed to listen, says, with tight-set lips and an angry frown:
“Maybe he is, but who knows if he isn’t the father of the brute who fired the explosive bullet into my son’s heart?”
Mona drops the newspaper and flies from the room, and the old man cries after her in a whimpering voice:
“What’s coming over thee, girl? I can’t tell in the world what’s coming over thee.”