Human life holds many wonderful hours. Love, marriage, suffering,
trouble, are crises full of romance and destiny, but I question whether
any man ever passed through an experience more thrilling than the hour
in which he stands at the Charing Cross or Waterloo Station in London or
in the great station in Paris and watches the hospital trains come in,
loaded with wounded soldiers brought in after a great battle.
Often fifty thousand men and women line the streets for blocks, waiting
for the trains. Slowly the wounded boys are lifted from the car to the
cot. Slowly the cot is carried to the ambulance. The nurses speak only
in whispers. The surgeons lift the hand directing them. You can hear the
wings of the Angel of Death rustling in the air.
When the automobile carrying two wounded boys moves down the street, the
men and women all uncover while you hear whispered words, "God bless
you!" from some father or mother who see their own son in that boy.
Now and then some young girl with streaming eyes timidly drops a flower
into the front of the ambulance--pansies for remembrance and love--upon
a boy whom she does not know, while she thinks of a boy whom she knows
and loves who is somewhere in the trenches of France.
One morning a young nurse in the hospital in Paris received a telegram.
It was from a young soldier, saying: "My pal has been grievously
wounded. He is on the train that will land this afternoon. He has a
young wife and a little child. You will find them at such and such a
street. I do not know whether he will live to reach Paris. Can you see
that they are at the station to meet him? That was his last whispered
request to me."
That afternoon at five o'clock, with her face pressed between the iron
bars, a young French woman, with a little boy in her arms, was looking
down the long platform. Many, many cots passed by, and still he did not
come. At last she saw the nurse. The young wife did not know that her
soldier husband had died while they lifted him out of the car.
The young nurse said that she never had undertaken a harder task than
that of lifting the boy in her own arms and leading the French girl to
that cot, that she might know that henceforth she must look with altered
eyes upon an altered world. A few minutes passed by and then a miracle
of hope had happened.
"I saw her," said the nurse, "with one hand upon his hair and the other
stretched upward as she exclaimed: 'I am only his wife, France is his
mother! I am only his wife, France is his mother! I give him to France,
the mother that reared him!'"