A WOMAN’S SACRIFICE

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXVII, Issue 1427, 22 July 1915, Page 2

A WOMAN’S SACRIFICE

The following incident goes to show that the men in the fighting line in France are supported by a similar spirit in the women whom they have left behind. It is a pathetic story of courageous selfeffacement :—ln a little northern town in France, through which troops are passing just at present, a woman in deep mourning called on the Mayor. ‘‘Why have no soldiers been billeted on me ?” she asked. The Mayor rubbed his nose and blew it hard. He knew her son had been shot a few days before, but couldn’t find the voice to tell her so. ‘‘l thought that in your sorrow —they would remind you,” he said at length. “They would console me,” she said. When a young and very dirty sergeant got to the house he found it lighted as though a festival were on. In his room were cut flowers. There was champagne at dinner. The mother in a pretty spring dress waved goodbye from the doorway next day’. “No,” she said to the Mayor, “I didn’t tell him about my son. It would have been a mistake to talk about my loss to a soldier on his way to fight.” And she went quietly indoors and put on her black mourning clothes again, concludes the narrator. In her soul the joy of sacrifice; in her life a sorrow that shall remain till the day breaks and the shadows flee away.