* * * * *

How gloriously brave are the French women and Belgian women! I was talking
to one in London—a young girl not more than eighteen or nineteen. She was
serving me in a restaurant, and I saw she was wiping her eyes, so I called
her to me and said, “What’s the matter, my child?”

She answered, “Sir, I came over on the boat from Belgium early in the war,
and my mother and sisters got scattered, and I have never seen or heard of
them since.”

And the Madame of the restaurant came to me a little while afterwards, and
said, “We dare not tell her, but they were all killed.”

Many people at home don’t realise what is going on. Some are in mourning,
some have lost boys, some have lost husbands, brothers, but we have not
suffered as others have suffered. I was riding in a French train a few
weeks ago. Beside me sat a lady draped in mourning. I could not see her
face, it was so thickly veiled with crape. Beside her was a nurse, and the
lady wept, oh, so bitterly! I cannot bear to see anybody weeping. If I see
a little child crying in the street I want to comfort it. If I see a woman
crying in the street I want to comfort her. God has given me a quick ear
where grief is concerned—and I am thankful. I wouldn’t have it
otherwise—though I have to pay for it.

That woman’s tears went through me. Every little while she was counting in
French, “_Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq,_”—then she would weep again and
then she would count.

I said to the nurse, “Nurse, what’s the trouble?” and she said, “Sir, her