Her voice had sweet, modulated tones, with just that touch of pathos which only the Angel of Suffering knows how to add. And her face was fair, and gentle, and a little sad, and very sweet.
"He has told me," I said. There seemed no reason why I should not say it. She had entered into the sisterhood—that universal sisterhood of suffering which the world has known in these long, lonely years.… And it was between us, for we were all in the family. There was no occasion to scrape acquaintance by slow, conventional thrust and parry.
"Yes," she said, sitting down, and motioning me to a chair. "I was bitter at first. I was dreadfully bitter at first. But gradually I got a different view of it. Gradually I came to feel and know that all we can feel and know here is on the surface; on the outside, as you might say, and we can't know the purpose until we are inside. It is as though life were a riddle, and the key is hidden, and the door behind which the key is hidden is called Death. And I don't believe it's all for nothing; I won't believe it's all for nothing. If I believed it was all for nothing I would quit; we would all quit.
"Then there is the suffering," she continued, after a pause. "I don't know why there should be suffering, but I know if there were no suffering there would be no kindness. It is not until you are hit—hard hit—that you begin to think of other people. Until then all is selfishness. But we women—we women of the war—we have nothing left to be selfish for. But we have the whole world to be unselfish for. It's all different, and it can never go back. We won't let it go back. We've paid too much to let it go back."
It was hard to find a reply. "I think I knew your husband, a little," I ventured. "He was a—a man."
"He was all that," she said. She arose and stood for a moment in an attitude of hesitation; her fingers went to her lips as though enjoining caution. Then, with quick decision, she went into an inner room, from which she returned with a letter.
"If you knew him you may care to read this," she said. "It's very personal, and yet, some way, everything is impersonal now, in a sense. There has been such a common cause, and such a wave of common suffering, that it seems to flood out over the individual and embrace us all. Individualism is gone. It's the community now; the state; mankind, if you like, above everything. I suppose, so far as German kultur stands for that, it has been imposed upon the world.… So this is really, in a sense, your letter as well as mine."
I took it and read:
I have had many letters to write since my service began as a nurse in the war, but never have I approached the task with such mixed emotions. The pain I must give you I would gladly bear myself if I could; but it is not all pain; underneath it, running through it in some way I cannot explain, is a note so much deeper than pain that it must be joy.
You will already have been advised that David Elden was among those who fell at Courcelette. It is trite to say that you have the sympathy of a grateful nation. How grateful the nation really is we shall know by its treatment of the heroes who survive the war, and of the dependents of those who have crossed over. But nothing can rob you of the knowledge that he played a man's part. Nothing can debar you from that universal fellowship of sympathy which is springing up wherever manhood is valued at its worth.