Mona knows that this is the beginning of the end. She finds herself thinking of Oskar constantly, and especially when she is dropping off to sleep at night and awakening in the morning. With a hot and quivering heart she asks herself what is to come of it all. She does not know. She dare not think. A feeling of shame and dread seems to clutch her by the throat.
One day the neighbouring farmer who comes to visit her father blurts out another of his shocking stories. It is about a mid-day raid over London.
Towards noon on a beautiful summer day, in an infant school in East London, a hundred little children, ranging in age from three years to six, had been singing their hymn before the time came to scamper home in childish glee to dinner, when out of the sunshine of the sky two bombs had fallen from a German air-machine and killed ten of them and wounded fifty. The scene had been a frightful shambles. Some of the children had been destroyed beyond all recognition, their sweet limbs being splashed like a bloody avalanche against the broken walls. And when, a moment later, their mothers had come breathless, bare-headed and with wild eyes to the schoolhouse door, they saw the mangled bodies of their little ones brought out in a stream of blood.
Mona enters her father’s bedroom just as the babbler is finishing his story. The old man, who is quivering with rage, has struggled to his feet and is stamping his stick on the floor and swearing—nobody ever having heard an oath from his lips before.
“They’ll pay for it, though—these damned madmen and their masters—they’ll pay for it to the uttermost farthing! Cursed be of God, these sons of hell!”
The Government in London must make reprisals. They must destroy a thousand German children for every British child that had been destroyed!
Mona tries first to appease and then to reprove him. What good will it do the poor dead children in London that other children in Germany, now living in the fulness of their childish joy, should be massacred?
“The children are innocent....”
“Innocent? They’ll not be long innocent. They’ll grow up and do the same themselves. Oh my God, do Thou to them as with the Midianites who perished at Endor, and became as the dung of the earth!”
“Hush! Hush! Father! Father!”