And when the
_denouement_ came, to sink their private anxieties in the public
welfare, to assume, not a double immunity but a double responsibility
to their people, has been the other part.
It has required heroism of a high order. It is, to a certain extent, a
new heroism, almost a demonstration of the new faith whose foundation
is responsibility--responsibility of a nation to its sons, of rulers
to their people, of a man to his neighbour.
It has been my privilege to meet and speak with two of these royal
women, with the Queen of England and with the Queen of the Belgians.
In each instance I carried away with me an ineradicable impression of
this quality--of a grave and wearing responsibility borne quietly and
simply, of a quiet courage that buries its own griefs and asks only to
help.
From the beginning of the war I had felt a keen interest in the Queen
of England. Here was a great queen who had chosen to be, first of all,
a wife and mother; a queen with courage and a conscience. And into her
reign had come the tragedy of a war that affected every nation of the
world, many of them directly, all of them indirectly. The war had come
unsought, unexpected, unprepared for. Peaceful England had become a
camp. The very palace in which the royal children were housed was open
to an attack from a brutal enemy, which added to the new warfare of
this century the ethics of barbarism.
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