Finally I stopped before her and asked her if she was ill.  She looked up into my face and said:  “Tres fatiguee, monsieur!  Tres fatiguee, monsieur!” (Very weary, sir!  Very weary, sir!)

By morning she was rested and accepted food.  Then she told me her story.  Two days before in her village they had been ordered by the army to leave their homes in a half-hour; everybody must be gone by that time; the Germans were coming, and there was no time to lose.  She had hastily gathered some clothes together.  The baby was lying in its crib.  Her other child, a little six-year-old girl, had gone out into the front of the home watching for the truck that was to gather up the village people.  A bomb fell from a German Gotha and killed this child outright, horribly mangling her body.  This suffering mother just had time to pick the little mangled body up and lay it on a bed, kiss its cheeks good-by and leave it there, for there was no other way.  She did not even have the satisfaction of burying her child.

“Very weary!  Very weary!” I can hear her words yet:  “Tres fatiguee!  Tres fatiguee!” No wonder you were fatigued, mother heart.  You had a right to be, weary unto death.  No wonder you did not care to eat all that long horrible night in the Gare du Nord.

Loneliness is naturally one of the things with which our own boys suffer most.  When one remembers that these Americans of ours are thousands of miles away from their homes, most of them boys who have never been away from home in their lives before; most of them boys who have never crossed the ocean before, they will judge fairly and understand better the loneliness of the American soldier.  It is not a loneliness that will make him any the less a soldier.  Ay, it is because of that very home love, and that very eagerness to get back to his home, that he will and does fight like a veteran to get it over.

“Gosh!  I wish I would find just one guy from Redding!” a seventeen-year-old boy said to me one night as I stood in a Y. M. C. A. hut.  He was about the loneliest boy I saw in France.  I saw that he needed to smile.  He was nothing but a kid, after all.

“Gosh!  I wish I’d see just one guy from San Jose!” I said with a smile.  Then we both laughed and sat down to some chocolate, and had a good talk, the very thing that the lad was hungry for.

He had been in France for nearly a year and he hadn’t seen a single person he knew.  He had been sick a good deal of the time and had just come from an appendix operation.  He was depressed in spirits, and his homesickness had poured itself out in that one phrase:  “Gosh!  I wish I’d see just one guy from Redding!”

Those who do not think that homesickness comes under the heading of “Suffering” had better look into the face of a truly homesick American boy in France before he judges.

The English Tommy is only a few hours from home, and knows it.  The French soldier is fighting on his own native soil, but the American is fighting three thousand miles away from home, and some of them seven thousand.