"Mother sends you her love; she says she is feeling better again—but she wasn't well enough to get up yet, else she'd have come with me this morning—but I was to give you this from her."
And the lad stretches his open hand out to his brother, and tries to hand him something wrapped up in paper—money! But the elder brother waves it aside.
"Put it away. Tell her I said she was to spend it on herself, and to look after herself properly, and be well and fit when we come back again."
Reluctantly the lad puts the money in his pocket.
A little ahead of us a young woman is tripping alongside. We have set a pretty smart pace, and she has to break into a run to keep up. But though her feet may stumble over the uneven pavement she never turns her eyes from her husband. What they may have to say to each other at the very last moment we can't catch. But we catch the expression of her face, and her comically touching devotion.
And now the crowds accompanying their soldiers through the streets become denser and denser. A few folk who are seeing members of their family off are running beside every section. White-haired fathers and mothers, with anxious looks, sisters, sweethearts, wives.
There is one among them of whom you can tell at a glance that she is about to become a mother. Well, she will be brought to bed lonely and desolate.
The man marching on my right, a taciturn yokel, who until now has been staring gloomily straight ahead of him, half turns to me.
"How many kids are there under way that'll never come to see their dads?"
And then he thaws, and begins to talk about his brother, who had to leave with the Army Service Corps two days before, and he was called on the Colors the very same day his wife was brought to bed, so that he had to leave her before she was out of the wood.