Here is a more spiritual picture.
Robert Le Roux, jun., was buried yesterday. You will have read in the previous pages here the story of his exploits on the battlefield—the closing of his young life in bravely leading his troops up the hill to certain death. And yesterday I went to St. Germain to his funeral.
The last time I had seen young Robert he was a little boy, in short breeches and socks. His mother brought him to Versailles and he played with us in the garden there—a strong, splendid-looking young French boy. Now I was going to his funeral, and he was engaged to be married, with all his hopes before him, and on this same train was his little fiancée, in her long crêpe veil, broken-hearted; and his little sister, and the father, who had followed his son's campaign with such ardor and such tenderness; and his uncle, Dr. D., of whom I spoke previously—the splendid sergeant-major whose only son had just been killed by the enemy. A train of sorrow!—and only one of so many, so many.
The church at St. Germain is simple and very old. The doors were all hung with heavy snow-white cloth, and before the door stood the funeral car drawn by white horses, all in white, and instead of melancholy hearse plumes there were bunches of flags, and over all hung the November mist enveloping, softening, and there was a big company of Cuirassiers guarding the road.
We went in, and the church was crowded from the nave to the doors, and all the nave and the little chapels were blazing with the lily lights of the candles. It was all so white and so pure, so effulgent, so starry. There was an uplift about it, an élan; tragic as it all was, there was ever that feeling of beyond, beyond!
Before the altar lay the young man's coffin—that leaden coffin that had stood by his father in the fortress of Toul for three weeks, waiting for the dead. It was completely covered by the French flag, and the candles burnt around it.
Beside me was a woman with her husband. She wept so bitterly through the whole service that my heart was just wrung for her, and her husband's face, as his red-lidded eyes stared out in the misty church, was one of the most tragic things I ever saw. I wept, of course, and I have not cried very much since the war broke out, but her grief was too much for me. Finally she turned to me and said: "Madame, I only had one son, he was so charming, so good; he has fallen before the enemy, and I don't know where he is buried!" Just think of it! There she was, at the funeral of another man's son because he was a soldier! Link upon link of sorrow and suffering—such broken hearts....
The whole service was musical, nothing else but violins and harps. It was the most beautiful thing I ever heard, so quiet and so sweet; and that little group touched me profoundly—Le Roux with his daughter and the little fiancée—and that was all. In that coffin lying under the flag Bessie had placed at Toul her little silk pillow for the young soldier's head, and his love-letters in a little packet lay by his side. Around his arm he had worn a little ribbon taken from the hair of his sweetheart, and at the very last when he was dying and the hospital nurse was about to unknot it—I don't know why—the boy put up his feeble hand to prevent her; of course they buried it with him, and, as you think of it, you can hear that unknown voice on the battlefield, that, as the stretcher-bearers came to look for the wounded, called out: "Take him, he is engaged to be married; and leave me."