The Green Bough

by E. Temple Thurston

IX

To Mary Throgmorton, tending and milking Mr. Peverell's cows at Yarningdale Farm, those first few weeks of the Great War were as the resultant dream that shadows the apprehensive mind.

Every morning after her work was done, she would retire to her room with her newspapers, therein to read the countless conflicting reports which they contained. The feverish desire to give active help or be amongst the first of those personally to contribute to the cause found her calm and self-possessed. She had her work to do. So long as the cows were there in Mr. Peverell's meadows, they had to be milked. Her duty it had been for the last eighteen years to milk them. Her duty it seemed to her to continue.

From all the villages round about them, the young men were going up to join the colors. Little processions of them accompanied by their mothers and sweethearts passed along the roads to the station, going to the nearest recruiting office. Most of them had flowers in their caps and went singing on their way, lifting their voices to a cheer at sight of any whom they passed.

Whenever she met them, Mary cheered in fervent response; but looking back over her shoulder when they had gone by, there were tears, hot and stinging in her eyes, so that always their departure to her was through a mist. They vanished, nebulous, like spirits, out of her sight. She looked till she could see no longer. The vision of them trembled as the air trembles over the scorching earth on a summer's day. She felt it was the last vision she would ever have of them.

Only their mothers and their sweethearts came back, little weeping groups of them, along the same road. Whenever she saw these approaching her, she would break her way into the fields or the woods rather than pass them by. For more than the boys themselves with the high light of a strange laughter in their eyes, it was the faces of the mothers as they all went by together, that had dragged, like the warning pains of child-birth, at her heart.

Pale beneath the wind-burnt ruddy skins they were. It was pallor of anger; anger of soul at the senseless waste. The cry of England for her sons was loud indeed. In countless hearts the note of it was shrilling without need of proclamation. These boys had heard it and heard no more. Their mothers had heard it too. No less had it rung its cry in Mary's ears. But deeper and further-reaching was the hearing of the women in those early days of war.

Later, doubtless, their senses became almost numb to the true meaning of that voice flung far across the land. Even the vitality of despair grew still in their breasts. The horrors of war sickened, choked, asphyxiated them. They gave their sons like animals going to the slaughter house with eyes that were staring and wide, and in whose nostrils the heavy smell of blood had acted as a soporific on the brain.

But at first, Mary had little doubt of the look she saw in those mothers' eyes. They were giving up, not what they had got, but what they had made. The created thing they were sacrificing; the thing which in love and pain and energy of soul they had offered out of themselves to give life to. There was little of the fervor of patriotism about them. To those country railway stations they marched with their pale faces, their set lips, the aching pain in their eyes. Each for her son's sake smiled as he looked at her; each for her son's sake smiled as she waved farewell. But on the hollow mask she wore, that smile was but a painted thing. He looked to his sweetheart or he laughed to his companions and it died away.

Somewhere in their buried and inarticulate consciousness, those mothers knew that wrong was being done to them. Vaguely they knew it was man with his laws of force and his passion of possession who had done that wrong; vaguely they knew it, but had no clear vision in their hearts to give them voice to revile.