Britain could not be starved. The submarine war, whatever its
devastations, and the vast inconveniences it had caused, was a failure.
And the colossal wealth of the United States in money, in food, in men!
Who knew her resources better than Gisela, who had lived in the country
for four years and found it an absorbing study, who had continued to
read American books, newspapers, and reviews up to the outbreak of the
war? Well, they were all at the disposal of democracy; and as the
Entente Allies, including the United States, were already many times
stronger than Germany, how could they fail to win in the end, no matter
how many millions of lives on all sides Germany continued to shovel
into Moloch?
All of these three clever German girls had been more or less prepared to
hear Germany proved a liar. They knew from British wounded that London
was neither a fortified city nor reduced to ashes; also that all the
Zeppelin raids on defenseless towns put together had been of less
strategical value to Germany than the taking of one village in the war
zone; she had merely piled up a mountain of hatred and contempt which
must be leveled by the quick repudiation of her people if they would
regain their lost intercourse with a triumphant world. Like all the
other women who had nursed near the front and knew the truth, they
translated into their own cynical vernacular such grandiose collocations
as "Strategic retreats" from that of the Battle of the Marne to those
which had been occurring periodically on the Western front since the
beginning of the Somme offensive of 1916.
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