“Ah, madame,” she whispered, “is it not terrible, the war?”
It is terrible, but it has brought to the surface a heroism and a grandeur of soul that few of us knew the French people possessed. I asked Madame de Ste. Croix to tell me of the women and girls who had borne children to the German invaders. “What will you do with those boche babies?” I asked her.
“We shall assimilate them,” she said proudly. And she added that the mothers, married or unmarried, as a rule loved their forlorn little babes. “I have known only two women who wished to get rid of their children,” she assured me.
Nature is stronger than convention. The heart of woman is a mother heart, and nothing can ever change it. It was man and not woman who invented the myth of the illegitimate child.
Yet over there in France, even the men have risen above that harsh and cruel tradition. Madame de Ste. Croix, who takes on herself the painful duty of telling men what happened to their women when the Germans came, told me how nobly and bravely French men have stood by and sheltered them.
There was a girl who came under her care shortly before her baby was born. It was a fine little boy, fortunately the image of its mother. She had lost everything in the war, father, mother, home, and she clung passionately to her child. Only, at times, she wept bitterly thinking of the young soldier she had hoped to marry, and who was ignorant of what had befallen her.
Madame de Ste. Croix looked up the young man, found his regiment, and arranged a meeting with him. His agony when she told him was great, but not for an instant was his allegiance to his sweetheart shaken. He had mourned her as dead and he blessed the noble woman who restored her to him again.
“What has happened is not conceivably her fault,” declared this fine young soldier. “I love her more for what she has suffered. If I could I would marry her to-morrow and be a father to her child. But I am not sure that I can. I am not sure that it would be for her happiness.”
With tears in his eyes the man told Madame de Ste. Croix that he was under twenty-five, and until after a man has passed that age he may not, according to French law, marry without the consent of his mother. This young man’s parents, he explained, were small town folk with a small town point of view.
Their morality was a little narrow-minded, and he feared that they would never consent to his marriage with a girl who had suffered at the hands of the Hun. They would pity her, of course, but they would not want her for a daughter. They would never be able to love the child.