“Let me go away now,” he implored, “and try to think what is best to be done.”
A week later he returned with a radiant face. He had obtained leave and had gone home to see his mother. There, on his knees, he had told her a lie, one that must have been recorded in Heaven to his favor. He told her that he was the father of that girl’s baby, that he had wronged her, and now begged permission to right the wrong by marrying her.
The mother’s reproaches were severe, and the poor young man had the pain of seeing her suffer for what she thought was his guilt. But after she had been induced to look at the baby’s picture her good heart was awakened. She agreed to the marriage and promised to love and care for the mother and child until the end of the war.
This man was a simple soldier, a child of working people. He did not know that he was heroic, and in fact what he did has been matched by scores of men in France. Very often after the Germans violated women and children in the invaded towns and villages, they murdered them cruelly. Those left alive have been cherished by their men, only too thankful that they were spared.
“Not that the men do not suffer,” said Madame de Ste. Croix. “We prize virtue and stainlessness in women. But we love justice more. And if this dreadful thing is hard on men whose betrothed are wronged, how much harder it is on a man whose wife has borne children to the brutal boche.
“He may forget what she has gone through, but how can he endure the presence of the child? What will be the future of those children, intruders in the family? I do not know.”
What has happened to thousands of women and girls in invaded Belgium and France could just as well happen in this country. It would happen without the smallest doubt if the Huns landed on our shores. Can you picture it? Can you imagine what it would be, fathers and mothers of America, to stand with German guns leveled at your heads while beasts in human form violated your young daughters before your eyes?
Can you imagine what it would be for our soldiers to come home from the war and find their wives and daughters with German babies in their arms? This is what many French and Belgian soldiers have had to endure. You will not persuade any of these men to listen to arguments in favor of a peace without victory.
All over France you will see in homes, in shop windows, on blank walls a poster. There are just three words on this poster: “Frenchmen, never forget!” In the upper right-hand corner of the poster there is a picture of some woeful thing that has happened since the German hordes began to overrun the world.
Sometimes the picture is of a burned and desolated village, a shattered hulk of what was once a beautiful old church. Oftener it is a picture of ruined womanhood, blasted childhood.