in parliaments, or yet on fields of battle, will lie the whole tragedy and ultimate test of war. What is it to the mother in her darkened dwelling that the tyranny of military domination in Europe has been destroyed, the liberties of the little nations established, the covenants kept that were made before she was born, by men whose names she had never heard of, and that the great empires of the world have entered into a league for the protection of peace, if all she has left as part of the price that has had to be paid for such triumphs and honours are a few soiled postcards, scored across with lines, a few scraps of letters scribbled in pencil from the mud of the trenches, and a few French photographs of her boy in his British uniform?
But I see, too, that an angel's searching eye is able to light up even that dark place of a mother's sorrow as with a heavenly torch, telling her that just as the woman who loses her child in infancy has a child always in her lap, and never knows the bitterness of seeing it grow up
