Saddest of all are the bereaved wives and mothers.  The reader will find many of them in the good Chaplain’s book, and they will bring the war closer than anything else.  Sometimes they stand mute under the blow, looking on the dead face without a sound, and then dropping unconscious to the floor.  Sometimes they cry wild things to heaven.  The Chaplain’s work in either case is not easy, and some of his most touching pages depict such scenes.

There was a boy of twenty years, who was slowly but surely dying of gangrene.  Let the abbe tell the end of the story: 

At 9 o’clock the parents arrive.  Frightened at first by the change, they are reassured to see that he is suffering so little, and soon leave him, as they think, to rest.  When they return at 10, suddenly called, their child is dead.  Their grief is terrible.  The father still masters himself, but the mother utters cries.  They are led to the chapel, while some one comes to look for me.  The poor woman, who was wandering about stamping and wringing her hands, rushes to me and cries, no, it is not possible that her son is dead, a child like that, so healthy, so beautiful, so lovable; she wishes me to reassure her, to say it is as she says.  Before my silence and the tears that come to my eyes her groans redouble, and nothing can calm her:  “But what will become of us?  We had only him.”

Nothing quiets her.  My words of Christian hope have no more effect than what the father tries to say to her.  For a moment she listens to my account of the poor boy’s words of faith, of the communion yesterday, of his prayer this morning.  But soon she falls back into her distraction, and I suggest to the husband that he try to occupy her mind, to make a diversion of some kind; the more so, I add, as I must leave to attend a burial.  She hears this word:  “I don’t want him to be taken from me.  You are not going to bury him at once!” I explain softly that no one is thinking of such a thing; that on the contrary I am going to take her to those who will let her see her boy.  We go then to the office, and I hurry away to commence the funeral of another.

I learn on my return that they have seen their son, such as death has made him, and that on hearing the cries of the mother, three other women, already agitated by the visit to their own wounded and by the funeral preparations, have fallen in a faint.

One day last Fall President Poincare, accompanied by M. Viviani and General Gallieni, was received at the American Hospital by Mr. Herrick, the American Ambassador, and by the members of the Hospital Committee.  Abbe Klein has words of praise not only for Mr. Herrick, but also for his predecessor, Mr. Bacon, and for his successor, Mr. Sharp.  His admiration for the devoted American women who are serving as nurses in the hospital is expressed frequently in his pages.  He says the labors of the American nurses and those of the French nurses complement each other admirably.  Of the founding and maintenance of the hospital at Neuilly, he says: