Page:Counter-currents, Agnes Repplier, 1916.djvu/133

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Women and War

diers lying in undreamed-of agony on the frozen field. We do not see the ghastly ambulance trains jolting along with their load of broken, tortured men; or the hospitals where these wrecks are nursed back to some poor remnant of life, or escape through the merciful gates of death. But we might read of these things; we might visualize them in moments of comfortable leisure, and take shame to our souls at the platform eloquence which so readily assumes that the sorrows of war are hidden in women's hearts, that the burdens of war are laid upon women's shoulders, that women are sacrificed in their helplessness to the hatred and the ambitions, the greed and the glory of men.

If by any chance a word of regret is expressed for the soldier who dies for his country, it is always because he is the son of his mother, or the husband of his wife, or the father of his child. He is never permitted an entity of his own. It

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