Her mind, normally
clear, acute, just, regained its poise. Moreover, those five years
preceding the war, during which she had learned to use her gifts for the
benefit of her sex instead of for her own amusement and fame, played
their insidious part.
When she was ordered to take charge of a hospital in Lille in June of
the second year of the war she had forced herself to accept the present
state of Europe with a certain philosophy. After all, war was its
normal, its historic, condition. Following a somewhat unusual interval
of peace, owing to the beneficent reign of the German Emperor, the war
microbes of Europe, cultured in the Balkan swamps, had, through some
miscalculation, after a deplorable assassination, ravaged the entire
continent instead of being localized as heretofore. Men were men and
kings were kings and war was war. Gisela sometimes wondered if the
hideous upheaval were anybody's fault, if the desire to fight had not
been more or less simultaneous in spite of the fact that Germany was
caught napping and permitted Russia and France to sneak over her
frontiers.
The sinking of the _Lusitania_ and other passenger ships, or rather the
results, had filled her with a horror that might have developed into
protest had she not been assured that the U-boats had purposely waited
for a calm sea, not too far from shore, that the passengers might have
every opportunity for escape; and that they had been the victims of
contraband cargoes of ammunition exploding, badly adjusted life-boats,
panic among themselves, and utter inefficiency and selfishness of the
officers and crew.
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