The people who went to that church were proud, they were very proud of him, he had died so beautifully. Each one of them was proud to say, "He was my friend," or "I knew his people," or "I saw him once," or just, "He was an American." He had died for an ideal they all had sight of.
It was only a memorial service. There were only the two flags, the flag of France and the Stars and Stripes, in the aisle before the altar. He was lying somewhere inside the enemy lines, as he had fallen.
They of the air, they go so far; and if they fall, it is perhaps a little more sad and lonely because it may be where no one of their own can go to them. Perhaps the enemy have laid a wreath there on the place where he fell, as they do sometimes, those men of the air, to honour one another's memory. They say on the inscription of the wreaths sometimes: "To our enemy who died for his country." For this boy they would need to say another thing, "To our enemy who died for his ideal." I think that we, in the church, were not sorry, but were glad for him, that we were envying him—we who only live.
Invaded Town, Wednesday, July 5th
To-day I was shown a letter that came—I was not told by what means—from one of the invaded towns of the North. It was the letter of a girl who with her father kept an old book-shop in the Place de l'Eglise. It was written to her sister, married in Paris, from whom they had had no news since the war began, but to whom they had managed to get word through—I do not know how—once or twice.
The letter, received only yesterday, was dated January 16. It told of a thing that had been vaguely rumoured here, that the papers had not mentioned, and that had passed for the most part unbelieved. The girl supposed her sister would have heard, and would be terrified for them, and was anxious to let her know that they were safe. I imagine the girl with a smooth blonde head and grave blue eyes, and the father, thin and stooping, with delicate white features and white hair, and a black skull-cap.
The letter began by saying that they were very well, and that the house was but slightly damaged. Aunt Emeline was with them, as her house was quite in ruins: she had been got out from behind the falling of the stair wall. It was impossible to go to the house of Cousine Thérèse, but she was safe with the children at the neighbour Payen's. The whole family had escaped miraculously. The girl said that in the midst of such terrible suffering they were ashamed to have suffered scarcely at all. It seemed as if they were not bearing their part of the sacrifice.
She had thought, that night, it was the house falling, and she had leaped out of bed, thinking she must go to her father. The shock had lasted ten seconds. She had had time to get in the dark half-way across the rocking floor, and to realize it was not only the house but the whole city that was rent and sundered. She had had time to think, "It must be an earthquake."
"That is what they tried, at first, to say it was," she wrote, "an earthquake. But we know that it was an explosion brought about by one of us. It was the Arsenal and the casemates of the eighteen bridges full of powder, between the three chief gates of the town, that were blown up. It was one of their most important depôts of munitions, where they had stored enough powder and high explosives to feed their Northern army for ten months. No one knows who did it. They have posted up offers of high reward for any one who finds the author of what they now call 'the criminal accident.'
"In all the towns of the North, where windows were broken and doors torn out of their frames, and where it was at first thought to be an earthquake, they have now put up posters on the walls, in their language and ours, demanding information about the 'criminal.'