One woman especially attracted me. I noticed her time and time again
as I walked past her with food. She was lying on her back on the
floor, with nothing under her, her arms thrown back over her head, a
child in her arms, or rather, lying against her breast asleep. She
looked like an educated, cultured woman. Her features were beautiful,
but she looked as if she had passed through death and hell in
suffering. I asked her several times as I passed by if she wouldn't
have some food, and each time she gave some to her baby but took none
herself. She could hardly lift her body from the stone basement to
feed the child, and feeling that the thing that she needed most herself
was food, I urged her to eat, but she would not.

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. When one remembers that these Americans of ours are
thousands of miles away from their homes, most of them boys who have
never been away from home in their lives before; most of them boys who
have never crossed the ocean before, they will judge fairly and
understand better the loneliness of the American soldier. It is not a
loneliness that will make him any the less a