I shall always be grateful for that phrase, for I recognised in it an epitome of the spirit of militarism, carried, as the Prussian arch-representatives of war carry it, to its logical extreme. For, according to modern militarism, war aims at annihilation of the enemy, and the enemy includes not only the combatants--these are the least offensive element--but the non-combatants, the men who represent the rival commerce, the women who represent the rival culture, and the men and women who represent codes of honour and humanity which are the beacons of the rival civilisation--at one and all of these, is aimed the blow which is delivered through the medium of the proxies in the field.
We three non-combatants--namely (_a_) a minister of the Holy Church, (_b_) a university man, who had officiated as judge in Burma, and (_c_) a woman engaged in hospital work, were now condemned to death, not because we represented a military danger, but because we represented, although in humble degree, those qualities of the rival nation, which had brought that nation to the front of civilisation. War aims at the annihilation, not of that which is bad, but of that which is best.
The Devil-Major, as we called him, then made us follow him upstairs, to the top floor, to a room in which we were to spend the night--the last night? He ordered me to be separated from the others, in another room, but I was responsible for the position of my companions, and without my influence--as a woman--death for them was certain, and I resisted the separation successfully. The Major then drove us into a room that was bare, except for verminous straw upon the floor. He refused to give us food, though we had not eaten since the day before, but water in tin cans was brought to us to drink, and we were told to lie down on the dirty straw.
The Devil-Major then warned the guards that if we moved, or talked to each other, they were to shoot us, then he left us for the night.
Sleep was impossible, owing to the ceaseless chiming of half-a-dozen church clocks, which seemed purposely to have clustered within a few hundred yards of us. The bells were all hopelessly out of tune, the tuners being presumably at the front; and every quarter of an hour all the bells of all the clocks, played different tunes, which lasted almost till the next quarter's chime was due. The discord was a nightmare for sensitive ears, but the harsh jangle of these bells, as they tumbled over each other, brutally callous to the jarring sounds, and to the irrelevancy of the melodies they played, seemed in keeping with the discordance--illustrated by our position--between the ideal of life, designed by God the Spirit, and the botching of that design, by murderous man.