What triumphs these are, what triumphs over sorrow and pain.

All of France is filled with these Silhouettes of Sorrow, but each has a background of triumphant, dawning light.

There was the woman and child that I saw in the Madeleine in Paris, both in black.  They walked slowly up the steps and in through the great doors to pray for their daddy aviator, who had been killed a year before.

A man at the door told me that every day they come, that every day they keep fresh the memory of their loved one.

“But why does she come so long after he is dead?” I asked.

“She comes to pray for the other aviators,” he added simply.

It was a tremendous thing to me.  I went into the great, beautiful cathedral and reverently knelt beside them in love and thankfulness that no harm had come to my own wife and baby.  But the memory of that woman’s brave pilgrimage of prayer each day for a year, “for the other aviators,” the picture of the woman and child kneeling, etched its way into my soul to remain forever.

“As I shot down through the night, falling to what I was certain was immediate death, I had just one thought,” a young aviator said, as we sat talking in a hotel in Paris.

I said:  “What was it?”

“I said to myself:  ‘What will the poor kiddie do without his dad?"’

Then there is that Silhouette of Sorrow that my friend brought back from Germany, he who was on the Peace Ship Commission, and who saw a train-load of German boys leaving a certain German town to fill in the gaps caused by the losses at Verdun; and because this sorrow is characteristic of the mother sorrow of the whole world, and especially of the American mother, and because it has a note of wonderful triumph, I tell it.

“I thought they were the hardest women in the world,” he said, “for as I watched them saying farewell to their boys there wasn’t a tear.  There was laughter everywhere, shouting and smiles, as if those poor boys were going off to school, or to a picnic, when we all knew that they were going to certain death.

“I felt like cursing their indifference to the common impulses of motherhood.  I watched a thousand mothers and women as that train started, and I didn’t see a tear.  They stood waving their hands and smiling until the train was out of sight.  I turned in disgust to walk away when a woman near me fainted, and I caught her as she fell.  Then a low moan went up all over that station platform.  It was as if those mothers moaned as one.  There was no hysteria, just a low moan that swept over them.  I saw dozens of them sink to the floor unconscious.  They had kept their grief to themselves until their lads had gone.  They had sent their boys away with a smile, and had kept their heartache buried until those lads had departed.”

I think that this is characteristic of the triumphant motherhood of the whole world.  It is a Silhouette of Sorrow, but it has a background of the golden glory of bravery which is the admiration of all the world.  A recent despatch says that a woman, an American, sent her boy away smiling a few weeks ago, and then dropped dead on the station, dead of grief.