Page:The drama of three hundred and sixty-five days.djvu/63

 to look, feeling they opened sanctuaries in which God's eye alone should see.

Old Lady So-and-So seeing her youngest son off to Flanders. She has lost two of her sons in the war already, and Archie is the last of them. The dear old darling! It is pitiful to see her in her deep black, struggling to keep up before the boy. But when the train has left the platform and she can no longer wave her handkerchief she breaks down utterly. "I've seen the last of him," she says; "something tells me I've seen the last of him. And now I've given everything I have to the country." Ah! that's what you have all got to do, or be prepared to do, you brave mothers of England, if you have to defeat a desperate enemy, who stoops to any method, any crime.

Then old Lord Such-a-One at Victoria to meet the body of his only son being brought back from the hospital at Boulogne. How proud he had been of his boy! He could remember the day he captained for Eton at Lord's, or perhaps rowed stroke—and won—for Cambridge. And now on the field in Flanders. . . . He had seen it coming, though. He had thought of it when the war broke out. "Ours is an old family," he had told himself, " four hundred years old, and my son is the last of us. If I let him go to the war my line may end, my family may stop . . . but then Rh