Finally I stopped before her and asked her if she was ill. She looked
up into my face and said: "Tres fatiguee, monsieur! Tres fatiguee,
monsieur!" (Very weary, sir! Very weary, sir!)
By morning she was rested and accepted food. Then she told me her
story. Two days before in her village they had been ordered by the
army to leave their homes in a half-hour; everybody must be gone by
that time; the Germans were coming, and there was no time to lose. She
had hastily gathered some clothes together. The baby was lying in its
crib. Her other child, a little six-year-old girl, had gone out into
the front of the home watching for the truck that was to gather up the
village people. A bomb fell from a German Gotha and killed this child
outright, horribly mangling her body. This suffering mother just had
time to pick the little mangled body up and lay it on a bed, kiss its
cheeks good-by and leave it there, for there was no other way. She did
not even have the satisfaction of burying her child.
"Very weary! Very weary!" I can hear her words yet: "Tres fatiguee!
Tres fatiguee!" No wonder you were fatigued, mother heart. You had a
right to be, weary unto death. No wonder you did not care to eat all
that long horrible night in the Gare du Nord.
Loneliness is naturally one of the things with which our own boys
suffer most.
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