The miserable group, forming themselves into a circle around him,
stretched out their hands beseechingly toward the man whom they knew to
be so very rich. The women showed him the death-pallor on the faces
of their scarcely breathing babies, their eyes glazed with starvation.
"Bread! . . . bread!" they implored, as though he could work a miracle.
He gave to one mother the gold piece that he had in his hand and
distributed more to the others. They took them without looking at them,
and continued their lament, "Bread! . . . Bread!" And he had gone to the
village to make the same supplication! . . . He fled, recognizing the
uselessness of his efforts.
CHAPTER VI
THE BANNER OF THE RED CROSS
Returning in desperation to his estate, Don Marcelo Desnoyers saw
huge automobiles and men on horseback, forming a very long convoy and
completely filling the road. They were all going in his direction. At
the entrance to the park a band of Germans was putting up the wires for
a telephone line. They had just been reconnoitering the rooms befouled
with the night's saturnalia, and were ha-haing boisterously over Captain
von Hartrott's inscription, "Bitte, nicht plundern." To them it seemed
the acme of wit--truly Teutonic.
The convoy now invaded the park with its automobiles and trucks bearing
a red cross. A war hospital was going to be established in the castle.
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