Tales of a Polygamous City: I. Taffeta Trousers

DECEMBER, 1917

BY AN ELDERLY SPINSTER

I

FORTY-EIGHT hours north of Calcutta, as the train passed between walls of swamp-grass and willows, I stood expectantly at the car window. My friends had said repeatedly, ‘Be sure you look out at the city when you get to the river.’ And as I waited — suddenly no more wall, but a great distance of gray sand stretching away to the purple foothills of the Himalayas, whose eternal snows glimmered shellpink in the sunset. Far away, this stream of soft sand was bounded on either side by olive-green groves, and above it shone the highest, bluest sky I had ever seen.

The train hurried over a mile and a half of river-bed, and drew near to the river, flowing deep and green against a brick wall. Beyond the wall, flat-roofed palaces rose through the haze of blue smoke which came from the evening cooking. And near me I saw, screened from the street beyond, brick stairs which led down into the water, and on the stairs, under branches of great overhanging trees, naked women were bathing, and some, wetly draped, were lifting filled water-pots of brass to their heads. I saw this, and the train drew into the city. And I saw wide crowded streets, above which, very high in the air, great gnarled branches of the sheshem trees on both sides met in cathedral arches. And the streeets of that city were pure gold.

The doctor says that she met me at the station that afternoon, and drove me home. But of that I remember nothing. Because of course there are no streets of gold, yet I was riding down one of them. Through those lofty branches, shafts of rosy gold were slanting down over us, making the little leaves above us shine like copper, and lighting into glory clouds of dust kicked up by laden donkeys and flocks of goats. From a thousand such afternoon experiences I know now that through that goldenness black-bearded Sikh soldiers, clad in khaki, crowned with ephod-shaped scarlet turbans two feet high, were loitering along, swinging canes; gaunt farmers were stalking homeward, their rags of dark blue skirts flapping round their brown legs; vociferous schoolboys were quarreling over the cricket game from which they were returning; grass-cuts, nearly naked, were tottering along under the great bundles of grass which they threw from their heads at the cart-stands; young men of the town, clad in full and immaculate white garments, were tossing coins magnificently at praying leprous beggars; common men arrayed in rainbow-colored cotton, loaded down with tin boxes and babies, were hurrying toward the station, furtively watching the veiled and bewildered wives who shuffled along behind them; Englishmen were riding past on high strange horses; voluminously trousered, hairy Pathans shrieked outlandish-sounding threats to men whose sauntering line of camels refused to turn out of their way. I heard men cry out, stung suddenly into wailing song; lambs bleating for their mothers; peddlers hawking icecream wrapped in banyan leaves.

All at once, where one tree of the rows was missing, I saw shafts of sunset light rush up against the high wall of a house, and bound back in waves of impossibly purple gold. Then I came to a place where, at one side of the road, beyond the trees, instead of contiguous houses, were cabin-like piles of pine logs, whose journey down the flooded river from mountain forests to the railroad had intensified their familiar fragrance.

After this I passed a hedged garden of roses grown for attar, protected on the far side by banana trees whose leaves flapped raggedly against the mauve twilight. Then, at the city side, beneath the largest tree of all, I saw a lemon-hedge trimmed high above a brick wall, and a gate. That gate I remember, because, when we turned in through it, beyond the gravel drive outlined with pots of freesias and heliotrope, beyond a clay tennis-court, on a brick wall, a peacock with spread tail was dancing in a misty amethyst light. We drove into the porte-cochère of a two-storied brick bungalow and had tea on the veranda. But of my impression of the tea and of the house, I remember only the jeweled peacock. I knew as I looked at it that my eyes were drunk with color. I had no way of knowing that I should never again be long content with sobriety.

That hour after I saw the river-front is the reason, I suppose, why I have lived in the city most of twenty years. Had I arrived on a day when the wind was stirring the trees into tempest and the driving rain carried only the odor of filthy soaked garments, doubtless I should have gone home again soon, as I had intended. But whenever I had a reason for going home, I had a better reason for staying.

That first evening the doctor took me up to my room. It was larger than some of the wheat-fields I had seen that day from the train. It was kalsomined in gaudy blue, and chastely furnished with six pairs of crude pine doors, a rush matting, a struggling fire in the grate, in one far corner a pine dressingtable with a mirror a foot square, and in the other a rope cot.

I had, of course, no experience of rooms which must be kept closely shut against heat from sunrise till sunset, for four months of the year. I took the kerosene lamp from the doctor; I looked around; I shivered. I guessed that I was five thousand miles from a steam-heated house. But when I remembered the peacock, I was content. The doctor and I slept on the veranda in front of her room that night, or rather we renewed our acquaintance there. But we must have slept, for I awoke — and beyond the great trees I saw the dawn come up like thunder, as it does in Mandalay. Exactly like thunder it came up, in rolling, rising, crashing clouds of copper and dull gold, reddening, breaking, mounting, out-topping one another. I needed a dawn like that to sustain me through my first Punjabi lesson, from which, a little later, I limply emerged, as I have emerged five thousand times since, sadly convinced that I shall never know that language, unwritten and living.

After three or four hours, I stood staring out at the mid-morning light in the garden. I had supposed that I had lived in sunshine all my life, and I suddenly realized that I had never seen it before. Beyond the garden was the hedge, with its mighty trees. And between it and myself there seemed to be, not air, not space, but sheer light, flowing, shining, glowing into sheerer light, very thin, always clearer, intolerably sweet and green. I learned that day what a treacherous light that was: such a light that, if one turns one’s back to it too long, one presently feels one’s spine, from one’s neck downward, being pulled out slowly, steadily, nerve by nerve; a light which, shining upon one’s unprotected head a few hours, can relieve one of whatever intelligence one may have.

Our city is like that sunshine, marvelous to look at and powerful enough, if one comes to it unprotected, steadily to tear one’s soul out, shred by shred, until presently one has no convictions left, no standards, no hope. Here we live exalted into heaven or cast down into hell — and so often the latter that I know every path and by-path of that place, whose existence to some seems problematic. Therefore have I seen compensating visions. That was a great initiation, when the significance of life around me broke over me in shocks and counter-shocks. As I came to realize that I was in all points exactly like the Indian women around me, whom I had supposed to be a cruder sort of oriental humanity, life became too sore for further bruises. But always, when I had begun to loathe every sort of consciousness, when I was too sickened for anything else, unless some little bit of that beautiful kindness which the women invariably show us made the world right again, we would tie our boat to the farther bank of the river and lie listening to the flow of the water till the starlight healed our souls and rested our bodies. At such times we agreed fervently with the admirable sailor who says that the heart of darkness is no place for women. It certainly is not. Why must it be so full of them?

Considering all this, we sometimes envied the exquisite English women who come from cantonments to call on us. Knowing nothing of Punjabi, because their husbands very rightly consider it a vulgar language, they glance at Indian women from a sanitary distance, and give their attention to paper-bound novels in the Club library, or to lesser drivel. When we talked to them, we enjoyed their beauty exactly as we enjoyed our tea-rose buds.

‘How do you amuse yourself all day long?’ one asked pityingly the other day. Then, feeling sympathetic, she added, ‘ I ’ll give you a receipt for chutney that you can get through a lot of time with.’

However, we are seldom driven to chutney-making, because the doctor manages a hospital of fifty beds, holds clinics every morning but Sunday, operates nearly every afternoon, trains her own flighty young Indian nurses, who marry as soon as they are at all efficient (or sooner), supervises three outlying dispensaries, looks after a girls’ school, attempts to regulate the practice of native midwives, and visits patients in the city.

And whatever she has no time for, I do if I can. I manage the hospital housekeeping, looking after food and clothing and bedding for the staff and patients. I try to keep the very modern young nurses happy with much badminton inside our walled garden, with books and songs, and discreet outings up the river. When any dispensary is left without a head, I chaperone some charming and susceptible young student back and forth to it twice a week until the place is filled. I manage the girls’ school entirely, although the doctor is responsible for it to the mission because I am not a missionary. I spend hours there, watching the gay little black-eyed girls sitting cross-legged on the floor as they scratch their letters on clay-covered slates; listening to them as they sing their multiplication-tables monotonously in the sunshine. I follow up cases in the city which no longer demand the doctor’s attention. I supervise three Christian Indian women, who go from zenana to zenana teaching those whom a young college Indian charmingly calls ‘airtight ladies.’ But mostly I prowl about the city, wasting hours and years in listening to tales, and loving the women who tell them.

Visiting is something that the doctor, of course, has no time for, and so I am humbly glad that I am not the doctor. Since the first day she saw the hospital, what time she has had to study Punjabi she has spent like a good doctor, studying medicine. As a result her vocabulary is limited to medical terms, and the originality of her idiom is equal only to the reverence with which it is heard. ‘Is the pain before or after?’ is a question impressive enough if the sufferer is sure that the doctor’s magic has only to be set going to give relief. Her skill, indeed, is too great to be considered anything but miraculous. ‘A merciful incarnation,’ Hindu women call her. And a genial, fat, low-caste dancing woman, who once enlivened one of our wards for a week, after pondering deeply the phenomenon of the doctor, remarked devoutly, seeing her hurry past, —

‘Will you consider now the blessing which the prophet Jesus has bestowed upon that woman! She walks so fast that no man in this town can keep up with her. And as she walks she heals.’

II

Part of the halo which surrounds her the doctor has achieved, part she inherited from her remarkable predecessor who built the hospital. Every family in the city has its own edition of tales about the first doctor, and each tale grows with the telling. But this much I have reason to believe is true. She was a Eurasian, the result of a union which very likely amused some one for a while, and which certainly involved for the child a lifetime of the contempt of both races. She appeared abruptly years ago, at the home of a missionary in another part of the province, and asked to be given lodging. There was no other place in the town where she might put up, and so, although the family and servants were wretchedly trying to ease one another’s malaria, — it was the season of the summer rains, she was taken in. She began nursing them with a skill and energy that seemed heaven-sent. ‘She was Scotch right through, if she was dark,’ the son of that house told me once admiringly. After she had made herself invaluable in the household for weeks without offering any explanation of her presence, one morning her husband appeared.

‘Send him away. Tell him I’ll never see or speak to him again,’ she instructed the missionary. And she never did, though the missionary, who liked the appearance of the man, urged her as much as he dared. ‘The day I came here, before the train got into this station, I found out from the stranger in the compartment that he had another wife,’ was all she ever said about it.

She decided, in spite of the family’s attempts to discourage her, to go to America with them to study medicine. She had only the passage-money. ‘ My father says she never argued or listened to advice. She decided things with a great and sudden determination,’ the son told me. In America she worked and starved for years, till she had the best medical education then possible for a woman. Then suddenly, alone, sent by the mission, she, the half-caste, appeared in our Moslem city.

According to the women, this is what happened.

‘She went to the deputy commissioner. “ I will build a hospital for all sick women and children. Therefore let the government give me thousands of rupees,” she commanded. So then that official, trembling, opened bags and bags of money, and what she wanted, she took. “I’ll have that land,” she said, pointing to what was then a truck-garden. So that land she had. “Build me a wall here, she said to one contractor, and “build me a wall there,” to one. And they built. And she said to a man, Bring me beams,” and he brought poor beams. And he died. Yes. I did n’t say she killed him. I said he brought poor beams, and he died. The whole town knows it. Yes. And all workmen feared and built hastily, not even stopping to smoke.

‘Men feared her, but not children. What they did in front of her she saw, and what they did behind her. And she was as big as ten men — this big’ — ‘this’ is invariably measured by arms stretched out as far as possible sideways. ‘And when the walls were half done, she saw a coolie peeking through a temporary screen, to where her first veiled patient sat. And she seized him by the arm and beat him with a riding-whip, so that they heard him howling from Ali Shah mosque to the railway station. And after that no man dared to joke about a woman’s hospital. And whoever was sick, no matter what their disease, she healed them. No one died in her day. It was n’t so much the medicine she gave as it was the way she patted you on the back and called you daughter.

‘And when the walls were up, she began planting the garden. She put all young plants in the ground with her own fingers, as if she had no servant. And she said to them, “Grow for the babies who have to take sour doses.”

So they grew. Yes. And when the hospital was opened, no one came at first. So she went visiting through the streets, toward evening, when men are at home. Into every house she went, and when she saw a sick baby she said, “Send the mother with it to me tomorrow.” And the men would say, “It is not our custom to let women go to public places.” And if they refused, she just put her hand on their arm, and said, “Don’t be silly.” She always carried that whip, and she was as big as ten men. So the hospital filled up.’

We envy her way of proceeding to get a government grant as much as we admire the skill with which she arranged the plant and laid the gardens out. The hospital house compound is a right-angled triangle, formed by two shaded wide streets. She hedged this beautifully, planted the point of the angle in orange trees and grapefruit, and inside of the hedge and in front of the gardens and along the drive she set rows of hardy tea-roses and hybrids. Along the little ditches which take water to the oranges she planted white narcissus for Christmas, English violets, heliotrope, and irises for spring, amaryllis for summer, and clusters of hardy chrysanthemums for fall. The two-storied veranda she draped with Maréchal Neil roses and trumpet vines. And the high wall behind the house, which screens the hospital compound, she covered at one side with sturdy honeysuckle, and at the other side, to hide our servants’ houses, she set out low-growing fig trees. There is a gate in this wall which leads into the hospital compound.

The gate in the wall on the other side of that compound, which is the base of the triangle, opens, not into a busy street, but into a prudent narrow alley built up on the other side with the walls of respectable houses, leading into a network of little streets used only by those who live in them, and by the women who scrape their sandal heels comfortably along through them as they come unobserved toward the hospital. The gate they enter is shaded by an old bougainvillea vine, which covers the walk leading to the bungalow where the morning clinics are held. The spaces between this and the other buildings are shaded with trees that Indians especially like, and bordered with their favorite flowers — fragrant pink roses and jasmine, whose white blossoms our patients string into their earrings on hot mornings, and beloved marigolds, and less familiar ones: blooming calla lilies in pots, and tuberoses, and white petunias, which blossom after the heat has dried up every other flower; and for the fall, everywhere, chrysanthemums. All around this are walls so high that no man can see over — an airy fragrant garden of rest and unveiling, an enchanted world, to some.

‘What sort of cabbages are those?’ a poor old tired thing from a village asked me once, pointing to big pink chrysanthemums. That woman said when she left, relieved of the agony of gall-stones, ‘I have seen heaven.’ I wished that the first doctor could have heard that.

‘When she planted those orange trees,’ our old cook has told me often, ‘she said, “I plant them. But others will eat the fruit that you carry from them to the tables.”’

And suddenly in the fullness of her passionate service she died sleeping.

‘In this city there has been no mourning like that,’ they say. ‘Her body lay in state in the room which is now the doctor’s bedroom. And all day veiled and weeping women filed up and down the stairs, rajahs’ wives, and pariahs.’

Two or three years ago a woman answered me, when I asked her if she never went out of her house, ‘Yes, I was out once. They let me go to the doctor’s mourning.’ That day the road in front of the house was full of men, sitting bareheaded in the dust, who rose and followed the body to the English cemetery. I have seen her grave there. On the stone beneath her name is written, ‘She hath done what she could.’

III

The hospital was deserted for a while then, until the morning when the city of women crowded out through the gate to see the new doctor. A bitter disappointment she was to them, they tell me, laughing over their misunderstanding. They had imagined, apparently, that she would be an exact duplicate of the first, and behold, although she was clearly all white, she was not nearly as large as ten men — scarcely as large as one. Her lovely brown hair, instead of being shiny and pulled back tight, curled about her face with a most untidy lack of dignity. She was young, and wore glasses over her eyes, and was unmarried, and was depressingly businesslike.

‘ The first doctor was a flowing river of pity for women. She’d had a husband herself,’ they say.

The only thing that impressed the women about the newcomer was her professional air. ‘She looked as if she knew everything,” they tell me; and I understand that, for I have seen a certain concentration of interest with which the doctor examines a case bringing to her face its utmost charm. She says now that she had great luck that first year. I know that, when I arrived, three years later, she had crowded clinics, full wards, and the exaggerating approval of the city.

That was a long time ago, and the doctor and I are no longer young. I take little pleasure now in the peacocks our neighbor the rajah keeps. In fact, I could gladly wring the necks of the lot of them, who screech like jackals through these summer dawns when one more hour’s sleep seems the only good. The streets are pure gold still, but at times I loathe the dust that makes them so, and long for sprinkled and swept asphalt. Sometimes I would exchange a year of those dawns that come up like thunder for one of the well-bred sunrises at home, which know the value of restraint. Sometimes I have shut my eyes to our great trees, which stretch their branches upward yearningly and send them down caressingly, achieving beauty, in spite of heat and drought, and have recalled rows of northern elms, standing stiff and upright like the men who walk beneath them. Sometimes, driven by this longing for sights that my eyes were born for, I have gone home, and for a while have loved my native land as only exiles can, consciously loving for months the sweet pressure of home air against my face, of which American skins are unconscious, worshiping the greenness of grass that American eyes never see.

But always, doubtless because my judgment is warped by the force and passion of our city, even as my palate has been dulled by curries, I grow tired, much to my disappointment, of the keen-minded, charming women of my own country. This is, perhaps, because their easy, liberty-filled way of living is too easy, the pattern of life too monotonous; from the base to the rim only laughing loves, monotonous unsatisfactory laughing little loves. I miss the skull things, in order grim — skull things in order, grim. I got the habit, when I was young, of living where

Endurance is the crowning quality,
And patience all the passion of great souls.

Many women get at life at home. I unfortunately never did. So I hurry back to where I found it.

Not that I imagine I accomplish anything here, unless, indeed, one is not altogether useless while one has a friend.

I have thousands of friends, — I don’t know how many thousands, — and I have loved them with a love which has devoured years, while they, I understand, like me because I amuse them. After all, to have made a woman laugh through an hour which otherwise would have bored her, is perhaps justification enough of one life.

There are homes in villages near our city where families receive me as a daughter. ‘She has come back to her father’s house,’they say, hugging me in their stately way And when I leave, they bring me gifts of eggs, which they cannot afford to eat, and of pop-corn. ‘Can a daughter leave empty-handed?’ they argue, when I protest. And I come away at such times mightily pleased with myself. Not every one in the world is worth half a dozen hoarded eggs. And sometimes a woman who used shyly to answer my questions in school, puts her baby into my arms. ‘You name it,’ she says. ‘She is going to know as much as you. And she is n’t to be married till she’s fifteen, even.’

The other day in the Lahore station a stunning young man, black-bearded and red-fezzed, bowed his head for my caress and called me the dearest name that the children have for their nearest aunts, their mother’s sisters. He warded off my most annihilating glance by explaining that he was one of a family of small boys whom I used to play with in a zenana where every year I ate the season’s first spaghetti. He told me about his wife as readily as if I had been his mother.

‘My father saw to it that she was one who can read,’ he told me. ‘She knows very much. She loves me very much.’ He meant that he loved her. ‘I’ll bring her to see you some day. No, I have n’t any children yet,' he answered me with a sudden enlightening smile.

He brought a basket of fruit to my compartment. ‘You gave me a rupee once for learning the Beatitudes,’ he explained.

I called him son when I thanked him. He was a dear lad, and remembering his mother, I felt as if I had brought him up with my own hands.

But the city is the same old unspeakably brutal and black-hearted place. One sees no sign of peace, or trust, or understanding, or truce between men and women, between victors and vanquished. The war was old when our women fled from the soldiers of the army which Alexander the Great halted on our river-bank. When Buddha, beneath our banyan trees, sighed over the sorrows of the world, our women flocked out to worship him, because, from their point of view, his doctrine was adorable. They stripped off their jewels, later, to enable their kings to defend them from the conquering Mahmud. But he scattered their defenders, and possessed himself of them all. Generations afterward, remembering Timur’s horsemen, whose hungry arms hauled them out of their hiding-places, they never ventured down to the river to wash their clothes without stationing a watchman on the high banks to warn them. Then Akhbar conquered the city, and saved the women alive. During the reign of the Sikhs, bandits once stole a wedding party, — bride, bridegroom, merry-makers, and horses, — at the place where the High School for Boys now stands. No one ever knew what became of the men.

And now the English rule, and the city has a hospital. But what of that? Can sudden institutions end centuries of experience of lust? Not that I would be unjust to the men of our city. They have, heaven knows, enough trouble with the women they have evolved, without my adding a grain to it. I have for them the sympathy that one has for men who are fools to the uttermost. They know no more of what they might make of those potentially magnificent women of theirs than they know of the design on the inner side of the seventh gate of paradise.

I know, too, just what they will say if they ever see this hopeful criticism of themselves. They will sigh patiently, and say again with that touching resignation, ‘Ah, the materialism, the grossness of the misconstruing West!’ and then they will smile at one another, knowing the gullibility of the silenced Occident. But I, fortunately or unfortunately, am neither of the West nor of the East. I understand perfectly what a temptation confronts them in the over-credulous, awe-smitten mediæval attitude of the West toward the East. I do not wonder that they evade questions which might arise. I only wonder that they evade them so tritely.

I rather despise them for it. Because I myself, a woman, have had to explain at least three times a day for the last twenty years, why I am not married, and I have made it a point of honor never to give the same explanation twice. Doubtless I have often failed in this, and have often unconsciously repeated myself. And often, since I was twenty-three, in the bodily exhaustion and mental weariness of the prostrating heat, I have backslidden into this explanation, so trite but oh, so effective! ‘When I was young my father did not make me marry. And now that I want to, I am too old!' And when I have heard the answer, — sometimes a sympathetic, ‘Too bad,’but very much more often a decisive ‘Thank God!’ —I realize the security with which the East of unfathomable subtlety begins again, ‘Ah, the materialistic’ —and so forth and so forth.

Of course, the men of our city, being Moslems, are far less influenced by the Indian systems of philosophy, which are more revered than understood, than the Americans who read this; and they know as well as I do that no people we have ever seen is more material, more grossly, sensuously materialistic, than they themselves are. ‘A jug of wine, a book of verse, and thou,’ the ubiquitous temporary ‘thou,’ not even ’you,'

—the intoxication of wine unnecessary, the book of verse forgotten, the wilderness unsubdued a paradise, — that is our city.

IV

Our city, I say — not India. Any one generalizes about India from what I have written, at his own risk. I venture to remark that it is no wonder that Indian poets, knowing the flagrant materialism of certain phases of Indian life, sigh over that of the new world, so apologetic, so tentative. And I believe — at times — that when the East is as spiritually minded as the West, she will be as industrial.

Far be it from me, however, to attempt to deceive the public. I acknowledge frankly that no one at all who knows me pays the least attention to anything that I believe or disbelieve. Only the other day, when I was upbraiding the doctor for having deliberately saved the lives of children who would so much better be dead, she sighed, ‘You have n’t a grain of common sense in your make-up!’

When I retorted, ‘I don’t want any; if there is one thing in the world I pray to be delivered from, it’s common sense,’ she answered, ‘Well, I must say this is the most remarkable example of answered prayer I ever heard of.'

I insist that I am not an authority on India at large. I know nothing about it, and I am not a tourist, that I should imagine I do. I cannot even say that the stories I tell of my city are true. I only say I saw them happening, and it seemed to me they happened as I have related. I don’t know that they could be true of any other Indian city; certainly they are no more closely connected with Calcutta or Madras than with Seattle or Paris.

For the benefit of tourists, I must say that the city is south of Lahore and north of Pindi, west of Multan and east of Jullander. It can be easily reached by the road that Kim and the Llama took through it. We are always glad to see visitors, and I believe that we are interesting to the medically inclined. We showed a lucky visitor one day recently a case of ophthalmia, one of leprosy, one of confluent smallpox, a baby born with malaria, — which is really a rare sight, — a woman in the last stages of syphilis, and, from a distance, a pest-house full of pneumonic plague. Of course we cannot always be so entertaining, but we usually have some of the aforesaid attractions.

Since the war began, we have had few tourists visit us. Our city is perhaps as little disturbed by war, and as quiet outwardly, as any city of its size in the British Empire — and possibly as broken-hearted as any. We can remember a long time ago when we were happy. Our sons were drawing good pay in the peaceful army. Suddenly they said that they were going to fight in a war. The sun has never risen one morning since they went away. They went as far away as Delhi, as far as Bombay, which is the limit of distance; they went across something that is called the sea; for months and months they traveled away from us—for years and years — forever. And all we have now in their places, — in place of our big, strong sons, — are the cards that we keep sacredly folded away in boys’ bright silk handkerchiefs, in the boxes with our jewelry — the cards that our Emperor sent when he heard that our sons were killed in his battles.

‘God’s will be done! ’ we say, though they were our life and our salvation. But some of us have gone blind, weeping. ‘The Lord establish forever our Emperor in peace,’ we repeat. There are no seditionists among us; we are pacifists all, and peace, we know, reigns through the English.

We know no history but the stories the old women tell us. ‘When I was little there was war,’ one says. ‘My mother sat cooking our rice at this fireplace. Three soldiers climbed over the wall. We were just little girls. She cried to them to spare us. But they were soldiers. But now the King insures us peace. Our sons die for that. Long live the Emperor!’

‘Long live the Emperor!’ we repeat. And some of us, as we say it, have blinded eyes, that no longer see the faces near us. But the faces of the lads, — of those who died alone in what is called a foreign country, — those faces shine before us forever.