THE MOTHERS.

Hokitika Guardian, 18 August 1917, Page 4

THE MOTHERS.

(By Maurice Maeterlinck, the Great Belgian Dramatist and Poet.)

It is they who bear the main burden of suffering in this war. In our streets and open spaces along the roads, in our churches, in our towns and villages, in every house, we come into contact with mothers who have lost their sons or are living in an anguish more cruel than the certainty of death. «

Let us try to understand their loss. They know what it means, but they do not tell the men

Their son is taken from them at the fairest moment of his life, when their own is in its decline. When a* child dies in infancy. it is as though his soul had hardly gone, as though it were lingering near the mother who brought it into the world awaiting the time wlieu it may return in a new form. The death which visits the cradle is not the same as that which now spreads terror over the earth ; but a son who dies at the age-of twenty does not come back again and leaves not a gleam of hope behind him.

He carries away with him all the future that his mother Tiad remaining to her, all that she gave to him and all his promise: the pangs, anguish, and smiles of birth and childhood, the joys of youth, the reward and the harvest of maturity, the comfort and the peace of her old age. He carries ayyay with him something much more than himself: it is not his life only that comes'to an end ; it is numberless days that finish suddenly, a whole generation that becomes extinct, a long series of faces, of little fondling hands, of play and laughter, ali of which fall at one blow on the battlefield, bidding farewell to the sunshine and re-entering the earth which they have never known. All this the eyes of our mothers perceive without understanding; and this is why, at times, the weight and sadness of their glance is more than any of us can bear. 11. And yet they do not weep as the mothers wept in former wars. All their sons disappear one by one, and we do not hear them complain or moan as in days gone by, when great sufferings, great massacres, and great catastrophes were enwrapped by the clamours and lamentations of the mothers. They do not assemble in the public places 1 they do not utter recriminations ; they rail at no one; they do not rebel They swallow tlieir sobs and stifle their tears, as though obeying a command which they have passed from one to the other unknown to the men.

We do not know what it is that sustains them and gives them the strength to bear the remnant of their lives. Some of them have other children, and we can understand that they transfer to them the love and the future which death has shattered.

Many of them have never lost or are striving to recover their faith in the eternal promises ; and here, again, we can understand that they do 'not despair, for the mothers of the martyrs did not despair either. But thousands of others,' whose homes are for ever deserted and whose sky is peopled by none but pale phantoms, retain the same hope as.those who keep on hoping What gives them the courage which astonishes our eyes? When the best, the most compassionate, the wisest among us meet one of these mothers who has just stealthily wiped her eyes .so that the sight of her unhappiness may not offend others who are happier, when they’- seek for words which, uttered amid the glaring directness of the most awful sorrow that can strike a human heart, shall not sound like odious or ridiculous lies, they can find hardly anything to say to her. They speak to her of the justice and beauty of the cause for which her hero fell, of the immense and necessary sacrifice, of the reinembrance and gratitude of mankind, of the unreality of life, which is measured not by the length of days blit by T the lofty’ height of duty’ and glory. They add that tfie -dead do not die, that there are no dead, that those who are no more live nearer to our souls than when they were in the flesh, and that all that, we loved in them lingers on in our hearts so long as it is visited by our memory and revived by r •ur love.

But even while they speak they’ leel the emptiness ol their speech. They are conscious that all this is ; true only for those whom death lias not hurled into the abyss where

words are nothing more than childish babble; that the most ardent memory cannot take the place of a dear reality 'which we touch with our hands or lips; and that the most exalted thought is as nothing compared with the daily going out and coming in, the familiar- presence at meals, the morning and evening kiss, the fond embrace at the departure and the intoxicating delight at the return

The mothers know and feel this better than we do ; and that is why they do not answer our attempts at consolation and why’ they listen to them in silence, finding within themselves other reasons for living and hoping than those which we, vainly searching the whole horizon of human certainty and thought, try to bring them from the outside. They resume the burden of their day’s without telling us whence they derive their strength or teaching us the secret of their self-sacri-fice, their resignation, and their heroism.