e card summoning each man to join his
depot, and tapped him on the shoulder with just a finger touch. It was
no more than that--a touch on the shoulder. Yet I know that for many
of those young men it seemed a blow between the eyes, and, to
some of them, a strangle-grip as icy cold as though Death's fingers
were already closing round their throats.

I seem to hear the silence in those rooms when for a moment or two
young men stared at the cards and the formal words on them, and
when, for just that time, all that life and death, means, came before
their souls. Was this the summons, Death itself? Somewhere on the
German side was a little steel bullet or a bit of shell waiting for the
Frenchman to whom it was destined. How long would it have to wait
to find its billet? Perhaps only a day or two--a question of hours,
slipping away now towards eternity as the clock ticked on. From the
old mother, or the young wife, from the little woman whose emotions
and quarrels, greediness or self-denial, had seemed all that mattered
in life, all that life meant to a young man of twenty-five or so, there
came perhaps a cry, a name spoken with grief, or no word at all but
the inarticulate expression of foreboding, terror, and a woman's
anguish.

"Jean! Mon petit! O, mon pauvre petit!" "C'est pour la patrie... mon
devoir... je reviendrai bientot... Courage, ma femme!"

Courage! How many million times was the word spoken that night of
mobilization by women who saw the sudden pallor of their men, by
men who heard the cry of their women? I heard it in the streets,
spoken quite brutally sometimes, by men afraid of breaking down,
and with a passionate tenderness by other men, sure of their own
strength but pitiful for those whose spirit fainted at the spectre of
death which stood quite close.

11

In the days that followed the Second of August I saw the whole
meaning of mobilization in France--the call of a nation to arms--from
Paris to the Eastern frontier, and the drama of it all stirs me now as I
write, though many months have passed since then and I have seen
more awful things on the harvest fields of death. More awful, but not
more pitiful. For even in the sunshine of that August, before blood
had been spilt and the brooding spectre of war had settled drearily
over Europe, there was a poignant tragedy beneath the gallantry and
the beauty of that squadron of cavalry that I had seen riding out of
their barrack gates to entrain for t