1
IT was they who bore the main burden of suffering in this war.
In our streets and open spaces and all along the roads, in our churches, in our towns and villages, in every house, we come into contact with mothers who have lost their son or are living in an anguish more cruel than the certainty of death.
Let us try to understand their loss. They know what it means, but they do not tell the men.
Their son is taken from them at the fairest moment of his life, when their own is in its decline. When a child dies in infancy, it is as though his soul had hardly gone, as though it were lingering near the mother who brought it into the world, awaiting the time when it may return in a new form. The death which visits the cradle is not the same as that which spreads terror over the earth; but a son who dies at the age of twenty does not come back again and leaves not a gleam of hope behind him. He carries away with him all the future that his mother had remaining to her, all that she gave to him and all his promise: the pangs, anguish and smiles of birth and childhood, the joys of youth, the reward and the harvest of maturity, the comfort and the peace of old age.
He carries away with him something much more than himself: it is not his life only that comes to an end, it is numberless days that finish suddenly, a whole generation that becomes extinct, a long series of faces, of little fondling hands, of play and laughter, all of which fall at one blow on the battle-field, bidding farewell to the sunshine and reentering the earth which they will not have known. All this the eyes of our mothers perceive without understanding; and this is why, at certain times, the weight and sadness of their glance are more than any of us can bear.