Page:Our Girls.pdf/102

 But then came war's worst tragedy—its bitter, wretched, heartless, devilish cruelty. During the days of waiting some of the girls had discovered that the other Gunner So-and-so was the son of a woman who was working in the same shop and she was a widow. And now, with creeping fear, they left the scene of the young wife's happiness and went over to where the old mother was working. They found her with her seamed face ashen, her parted lips quivering, and her glassy eyes with a barrage of unshed tears behind them. She, too, had had a telegram, and she was still holding it in her trembling fingers. . . . O God, what demon invented war—what demon out of the depths of hell?

The war has been full of surprises, and not more startling have been the surprises of the battlefield than the dramatic and even melodramatic incidents at home, which are fast putting a period to the tall talk of the people who say such things "do not happen." In one of the smaller