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She sat in the
restaurant with two other ladies, who were also in black. The
octogenarian censor of telegrams passed them on the way out. To her two
companions he bowed deeply, but at her side he halted and, bending very
low, he kissed her hand, and then went away without a word.
The head waiter, who knows all the gossip of the house and of half the
town besides, told us about her. Her only son, a lieutenant of
artillery, was killed at the taking of Liege. It was three days before
she learned of his death, though she was here in Aachen, only a few
miles away; for so slowly as this does even bad news travel in war times
when it pertains to the individual.
Another week elapsed before her husband, who is a lieutenant-colonel,
could secure leave of absence and return from the French border to seek
for his son's body; and there was still another week of searching before
they found it. It was at the bottom of a trench, under the bodies of a
score or more of his men; and it was in such a state that the mother had
not been permitted to look on her dead boy's face.


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