A Belgian babe of two, a dimpled, radiant creature, seemingly untouched by the storm which had flung her from her own luxurious nurseries into a bare English lodging, was found, two days after her arrival in exile, kissing and talking to the little crucifix which hung round her neck. Her mother bent to listen.
“Dear Jesus,” the child was saying, “poor wounded soldier!”
The profound and mystic consolation of the link between the human agony and the Divine had somehow dawned upon the infant mind, and found this tender expression.
A little boy we knew said to his mother one evening as she tucked him up in his cot:
“Oh, mammie, I die a little every night, I love you so.” Here, with an exquisite directness, the inevitable pain of a deep tenderness is laid bare by the lips of innocence.
It is this quality of simplicity and directness—yes, we are not afraid to say it, of innocence—which makes the stories of our soldiers so infinitely touching.
“Tell daddie and mammie,” said a dying Irish lad to the comrade who bent over him to take his last message, “’twas against their will I ’listed; tell them I’m not sorry now I did it.”
No fine-sounding phrase, no stirring oration, could more piercingly set forth the triumph of the ultimate sacrifice of patriotism. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.