My little girl! I have a little girl in my home!...
You bring back my smile to me in a heavy time....
I gaze up at the sky and am silent. And far and near the busy, noisy swarm of workers is silent. Every one looks up, seeking some point in the far sky. Officers and men for a single heart-throb listen as to a distant song from the lips of children and from a mother's mouth—stand there and smile around me, in blissful pensiveness, as if there were no longer an enemy. Every one seems to feel the sun, the sun of olden happiness.
And yet, it had merely chanced that on the German Rhine, in an old castle lost amid trees, a dear little German girl was born.
(Written Sept. 17, 1914, in the field.)
Letter of the Duke of Altenburg
From a letter written from the front by the Duke of Altenburg on Sept. 5, and published in the Altenburger Zeitung.
WE have lived through a great deal and done a great deal, marching, marching continually, without rest or respite. On Aug. 10 we reached Willdorf, near Jülich, by train, and from the 12th of August we marched without a single day of rest except Aug. 16, which we spent in a Belgian village near Liége, until today, when we reached ——. Those have been army marches such as history has never known.
