I happened to be walking along the Boulevard to my hotel. The big gun
had been throwing its shells into the city all day. Suddenly one fell
so close to where I was walking that it broke the windows around me,
and I was nearly thrown to my feet. In my soul I cursed the Hun, as
all who have lived in Paris finally come to be doing as each shell
bursts. But I had more reason to curse than I knew at that moment.
The people were running into a side street, the next one toward which I
was approaching. I followed the crowd. My uniform got me past the
gendarmes in through a little court, up a pair of stairs where the
shell had penetrated the walls of a maternity hospital.
What I saw there in that room shall make me hate the Hun forever.
New-born babes had been killed, a nurse and two mothers. When I
thought of the expectant homes into which those babes had come, when I
thought of the fathers at the front who would never see again either
their wives or those new babies, when I saw the blood that smeared the
plaster and floors of that room, when I saw the little twisted baby
beds, a flush of hatred swept over me, as it did over all who saw it, a
new birth of hatred that could never die until those little babies and
those mothers and the nurse are avenged. That is a Silhouette of
Sacrilege that makes the gamut complete.
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