How many of the boys I watched playing prisoners' base
round their guns in the intervals of firing are there to-day? How many
remain of that little company of soldiers who gave three cheers for me
because I was the only woman they had seen for months? How many of the
officers who shrugged their shoulders when I spoke of danger have gone
down to death?
Outside the window where I am writing this, Fifth Avenue, New York,
has just left its churches and is flaunting its spring finery in the
sun. Across the sea, such a little way as measured by time, people are
in the churches also. The light comes through the ancient,
stained-glass windows and falls, not on spring finery, not on orchids
and gardenias, but on thousands of tiny candles burning before the
shrine of the Mother of Pity.
It is so near. And it is so terrible. How can we play? How can we
think of anything else? But for the grace of God, your son and mine
lying there in the spring sunlight on the muddy battlefield of Ypres!
CHAPTER XVII
IN THE LINE OF THE "MITRAILLEUSE"
I was taken to see the battlefield of Ypres by Captain Boisseau, of
the French War Academy, and Lieutenant Rene Puaux, of the staff of
General Foch. It was a bright and sunny day, with a cold wind,
however, that set the water in the wayside ditches to rippling.
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