heard since it began to roll
along the paths of space and time! They were still there, the ideal
forces! They were mounting upward, on every side, from the depths of
all those swiftly-assembling souls, not merely intact but more than
ever radiant, more than ever pure, more numerous and mightier than
ever! To the amazement of all of us, who possessed them without
knowing it, they had increased in strength and stature while
apparently neglected and forgotten.

To-day there is no longer any doubt. We may expect all things and hope
all things from the men and the women who have surmounted this long
and grievous trial. If the heroism displayed by man on the battlefield
has never been comparable with that which is being lavished at this
moment, we may also say of the women that their heroism is even more
beyond comparison. We knew that a certain number of men were capable
of giving their lives for their country, for their faith or for a
generous ideal; but we did not realize that all would wrestle with
death for endless months, in great unanimous masses; and above all we
did not imagine, or perhaps we had to some extent forgotten, since the
days of the great martyrs, that woman was ready with the same gift of
self, the same patience, the same sacrifices, the same greatness of
soul and was about--less perhaps in blood than in tears, for it is
always on her that sorrow ends by falling--to prove herself the rival
and the peer of man.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 8: Delivered in Paris, at the Trocadero, 18 December, 1915.]

* * * * *

THE LIFE OF THE DEAD

XVIII

THE LIFE OF THE DEAD

1

The other day I went to see a woman whom I knew before the war--she
was happy then--and who had lost her only son in one of the battles in
the Argonne. She was a widow, almost a poor woman; and, now that this
son, her pride and her joy, was no more, she no longer had any reason
for living. I hesitated to knock at her door. Was I not about to
witness one of those hopeless griefs at whose feet all words fall to
the ground like shameful and insulting lies? Which of us to-day is not
familiar with these mournful interviews, this dismal duty?

To my great astonishment, she offered me her hand with a kindly smile.
Her eyes, to which I hardly dared raise my own, were free of tears.

"You have come to speak to me of him," she said, in a cheerful tone;
and it was as though her voice had grown younger.