No one spoke.  But the soldier pointed, silently and eloquently, to one brown mound in a row of brown mounds that looked alike, each like the other.  Then he drew away.  And Hogge and Adam stopped, and stood together, quiet and grave.  And so I went alone to my boy’s grave, and flung myself down upon the warm, friendly earth.  My memories of that moment are not very clear, but I think that for a few minutes I was utterly spent, that my collapse was complete.

He was such a good boy!

I hope you will not think, those of you, my friends, who may read what I am writing here, that I am exalting my lad above all the other Britons who died for King and country—­or, and aye, above the brave laddies of other races who died to stop the Hun.  But he was such a good boy!

As I lay there on that brown mound, under the June sun that day, all that he had been, and all that he had meant to me and to his mother came rushing back afresh to my memory, opening anew my wounds of grief.  I thought of him as a baby, and as a wee laddie beginning to run around and talk to us.  I thought of him in every phase and bit of his life, and of the friends that we had been, he and I!  Such chums we were, always!

And as I lay there, as I look back upon it now, I can think of but the one desire that ruled and moved me.  I wanted to reach my arms down into that dark grave, and clasp my boy tightly to my breast, and kiss him.  And I wanted to thank him for what he had done for his country, and his mother, and for me.

Again there came to me, as I lay there, the same gracious solace that God had given me after I heard of his glorious death.  And I knew that this dark grave, so sad and lonely and forlorn, was but the temporary bivouac of my boy.  I knew that it was no more than a trench of refuge against the storm of battle, in which he was resting until that hour shall sound when we shall all be reunited beyond the shadowy borderland of Death.

How long did I lie there?  I do not know.  And how I found the strength at last to drag myself to my feet and away from that spot, the dearest and the saddest spot on earth to me, God only knows.  It was an hour of very great anguish for me; an hour of an anguish different, but only less keen, than that which I had known when they had told me first that I should never see my laddie in the flesh again.  But as I took up the melancholy journey across that field, with its brown mounds and its white crosses stretching so far away, they seemed to bring me a sort of tragic consolation.

I thought of all the broken-hearted ones at home, in Britain.  How many were waiting, as I had waited, until they, too,—­they, too,—­ might come to France, and cast themselves down, as I had done, upon some brown mound, sacred in their thoughts?  How many were praying for the day to come when they might gaze upon a white cross, as I had done, and from the brown mound out of which it rose gather a few crumbs of that brown earth, to be deposited in a sacred corner of a sacred place yonder in Britain?