3
For many months she did her duty doggedly, her indignation routed by the
disquieting fact that the Germans were retreating from the Somme; inch
by inch, but still retreating. Once she might have been satisfied with
grandiose phrases and scornful assurances. But the long attack on Verdun
had ended in dark humiliation; a failure that the most resourceful
vocabulary was unable to translate into a German advantage, optically
inverted.
More than half a million young Germans had fallen before Verdun, and for
what? That France, disdained these many years by the mighty Teutonic
Empire, and numerically inferior, might demonstrate to the world that
she was the greater military nation of the two.
What was it all for? What of the ever-receding fields of peace, grown
green and fat again? What of the racing past dotted with the broken
headstones of promises of victory by this means or that?
But to attempt to answer historical enigmas while working day and night
over the mangled victims of the Somme was beyond her powers. It was not
until she broke down, and, with Heloise von Erkel and Mimi Brandt,
obtained leave to spend a month at St. Moritz, that she found her
answer.
III
1
The three girls went to a little hotel that had been a favorite resort
of Gisela's in times of peace when she had felt an imperative need of
the high solitudes and eternal snows.
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