So it may be that we are not only fighting for our children, to deliver them from the intolerable yoke of the Hun, but that we are also suffering for our children, to deliver them from the punishment of our own sins.
We meant to call this chapter “War-babies,” only for the newspaper discussion which has made even innocence itself the subject of passionate and unpleasant discussion.
There have been a good many war-babies in the neighbourhood as well as Plain Eliza. The Signorina of the Villino has already acted godmother several times to infant exiles. These little ones, we thank Heaven, have arrived surprisingly jolly and unimpressed. Yet the poor mothers had, most of them, fled from the sound of the cannon and the menace of the shells, happy if they saw nothing worse than the flames which were consuming their homes and all that those homes held and meant for them. The Signorina is very particular that the girls should be called Elizabeth and the boys Albert, with due loyalty to a sovereignty truly royal in misfortune.
“Mademoiselle,” writes one young woman, “I have the happiness to announce to you that I have the honour to have become the mother of a beautiful little daughter.”
She meant what she said--marvellous as it may seem not to regard the event in such circumstances as an added anguish!
We have heard of the birth of a child to a widow of eighteen--a peasant girl in Brussels--who was forced by the invaders not only to watch her father and husband and both brothers struck down under her eyes, but to assist in burying them while they were still breathing.
“It is a very ugly little baby,” writes the kind lady who is its godmother, “and the poor mother is very ill. When she gets better it will be a comfort to her.”
In these days, when the lid of hell has been taken off--as Mr. Elbert Hubbard, one of the victims of the _Lusitania_, graphically declared--when legions of devils have been let loose upon an unsuspecting world, the case of the eighteen-year-old peasant woman in the Brussels _asile_ is by no means the most to be pitied. Her child will be a comfort to her. Not so will it be with the many unfortunate Belgian village mothers--to whom children are being, we hear, born maimed in awful testimony of the mutilations which the wives have been forced to witness deliberately inflicted on their husbands. War-babies, indeed! Stricken before birth, destined to bear through a necessarily bitter existence the terrible mark of the barbarian foe.