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And yet they do not weep as the mothers wept in former wars. All their sons disappear one by one; and we do not hear them complain or moan as in days gone by, when great sufferings, great massacres and great catastrophes were surrounded by the clamours and lamentations of the mothers.
They do not gather in the public places, they do not utter recriminations, they rail at no one, they do not rebel. They swallow their sobs and stifle their tears, as though obeying a command which they have passed from one to the other, unknown to the men.
We do not know what it is that sustains them and gives them the strength to endure the remnant of their lives. Some of them have other children; and we can understand that they transfer to these the love and the future which death has shattered. Many of them have never lost or are striving to recover their faith in the eternal promises; and here again we can understand that they do not despair, for the mothers of the martyrs did not despair either. But thousands of others, whose home is for ever deserted and whose sky is peopled by none but pale phantoms, retain the same hope as those who keep on hoping. What gives them this courage which astonishes whenever we behold it?
When the best, the most compassionate, the wisest among us meet one of these mothers who has just stealthily wiped her eyes, so that the sight of her unhappiness may not offend others who are happier, when we seek for words which, uttered amid the glaring directness of the most awful sorrow that can strike a human heart, shall not sound like odious or ridiculous lies, we can hardly find anything to say to her. We speak to her of the justice and the beauty of the cause for which her hero fell, of the immense and necessary sacrifice, of the remembrance and gratitude of mankind, of the irreality of life, which is measured not by the length of days but by the lofty height of duty and glory. We add perhaps that the dead do not die, that there are no dead, that those who are no more live nearer to our souls than when they were in the flesh and that all that we loved in them lingers in our hearts so long as it is visited by our memory and revived by our love.
But, even while we speak, we feel the emptiness of what we say. We are conscious that all this is true only for those whom death has not hurled into the abyss where words are nothing more than childish babble; that the most ardent memory cannot take the place of a dear reality which we touch with our hands or lips; and that the most exalted thought is as nothing compared with the daily going out and coming in, the familiar presence at meals, the morning and evening kiss, the fond embrace at the departure and the intoxicating delight at the return. The mothers know and feel this better than we do; and that is why they do not answer our attempts at consolation and why they listen to them in silence, finding within themselves other reasons for living and hoping than those which we, vainly searching the whole horizon of human certainty and thought, try to bring them from the outside. They resume the burden of their days without telling us whence they derive their strength or teaching us the secret of their self-sacrifice, their resignation and their heroism.
THREE UNKNOWN HEROES