The camp chapel (half church, half theatre) is a large wooden barn with a stage at one end, no seats on the floor. On the stage, behind a small deal table, the Lutheran pastor, in a black gown, is reading the lesson from his big Bible. On the floor in front of him are five or six hundred men, all standing in lines. They make a pitiful spectacle—some young (almost boys), some elderly (almost old), some wearing good clothes, some in rags, some well shod, some with their naked feet showing through the holes in their worn-out shoes, some with fine clear-cut features, and some with faces degraded by drink and debased by crime. Every eye is on the pastor, and there is no sound in the bare place but the sound of his voice.
The silence is broken by the lifting of the latch of a door near to the stage. At the next moment a woman enters. Everybody knows her—it is “the Woman of Knockaloe.” She stands for a moment as if dazed by the eyes that are on her, and then somebody by her side (she knows who it is, although she does not look at him) touches her arm and leads her to a chair, which has been hurriedly brought in from an ante-room and placed in the middle of the front row.
When the lesson is finished the pastor gives out a hymn. It is the same hymn as she heard last night, but after the man from the door has stepped forward and played the overture on the harmonium, she finds herself on her feet in the midst of the prisoners.
In full, clear, resonant voices the men are singing in their German, when suddenly they become aware that a woman is singing with them in English—the same hymn to the same tune.
“Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott....”
“A sure stronghold our God is still....”
The voices of the men sink for a moment, as if they are listening, and then, as by one spontaneous impulse, they rise and swell until the place seems to throb with them.
When the hymn comes to an end Mona sits and the pastor begins his sermon. She can understand only a word of it now and again, and her eyes wander to the door. Oskar is there. His head is up and his eyes are shining.
“O Lord, stop the war, stop it, stop it!”
Summer has come again; the sun rises and sets, the birds sing and nest, the landscape preserves its solemn peace, but still the war goes on. The last kick of the enemy, which the Swiss doctors had foreseen, has been made and it is over. After a devastating advance, there has been a still more devastating retreat.