“There must be no difference between the two brothers. We might as well make a coffin for our lieutenant, too.”
By nightfall, when they were ready to bury the brothers side by side, an old woman spoke up. She was a wretched old creature, so poor and broken that she stubbornly refused to leave the village. “I’ve lived here, I’ll die here,” she kept on saying. She lay huddled up on some straw in her little hovel, and her only food was the leavings of the soldiers. When she saw the bodies of the two lads and understood what was going on, she said:
“Wait a minute before you nail the covers on. I’m going to fetch something.”
She hobbled away, fumbled around in the straw she slept on, and pulled out a piece of cloth that she was keeping for her shroud.
“They shan’t nail those boys up with their faces against the boards. I want to shroud them,” she said.
She cut the shroud in two and wrapped each in a half of it. Then she kissed each one of them on the forehead, saying,
“That’s for your mother, dearie.”
. . .
No one spoke when the General ended. And he was not the only one to have wet eyes. In each of our hearts there was a prayer for France.
Maurice Barrès
de l’Académie Française