A gray lock with bleached ribbon bound,
And this inscription hung thereon:
“I pray for you, my dearest son.”
And, following this, the editor — Mr. Schlemm again — writes: “The first and last right to a child is of course the mother’s, who has received the child from God and gives it back to Him.”
She puts the pamphlet down and closes her eyes. “Upon his breast, shot through…” “… the first and last right….”
She looks into his room to see if he is asleep; she watches him lying flat on his back, open-mouthed, with a mesh of fine blond hair fallen across his forehead. A little look of pain runs over his face; he was very stiff from all the marching, and his hand, that she did not know was hurt, is bandaged awkwardly.
His mother looks at him, and knows: “He does not belong to me, but to the State, which will send him into war as soon as he is big enough, which has already taken him from me and made him a stranger, which insists that he march and shoot and remember that blind obedience to it counts far more than love to me.” She stands there, motionless and hoping bitterly that he will move, or call out for her. Perhaps he will murmur something friendly, thinking kindly of her in his dreams. But nothing of the sort happens. He sleeps like a log, as if he had fainted. “They’ve overtired him again,” she thinks, and remembers the family physician’s warning — delicate and considerate — against these forced marches. The boy is none too strong. “They’ll kill him in the end,” she thinks.
The dark room hardly looks like a playroom. The boy is ten. But where are the toys, the Indian feathers, the games and story-books, full of adventure and spellbound princesses? The titles that catch the light from the door are those of the books read during the long “Comrades’ Evenings”:
Aviator’s Nest in the Elder-Bushes, Life Stories of German War Aces, The Infantry Marches On, The Book of German Colonies for the Young, Peter, the Soldier-Boy, and Sister Claire at the Front.
She had to give him these books. She remembers it only too well — and his answer, when she asked whether he enjoyed them. “Of course,” he said, with his angry look, “what else is there to read?”