In abnormal times
the human mind seeks more than an ordinary faith.
He would have slept well, but in the night an army passed. For hours and
hours the gray legions trod by in numbers past counting, the moonlight
casting gleams upon the spiked helmets. Then came masses of Uhlans and
hussars and after them batteries of great guns and scores and scores of
the wicked machine guns. Truly, as the priest had said, the whole world
had gone mad. He remembered those days in Vienna when the gay and
light-head ed Viennese had marched up and down the streets all night
long, singing and dancing, and thinking only of war as a festival, in
which glorious victory was sure and quick. Torrents of blood had flowed
under the bridges since then, gay Austria, that had set the torch, had
been shaken to its foundation, and no victory was yet in sight for
anybody.
Nevertheless the German legions seemed inexhaustible. John had seen them
turned back in those long days of fighting on the Marne, and more than a
million had been killed or wounded since the war began, but that
avalanche of men and guns still poured out of the heart of Germany. He
felt more deeply than ever that the world could not afford a German
victory, and the sanguinary spectacle of a Kaiser riding roughshod over
civilization. The fact that so many German people were likable and that
Germany had achieved so much made the case all the worse.
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