The Sorrows

He spread it before me, and it was written within and without; and there was written therein lamentations, and mourning, and woe.

EZEKIEL

The air is full of farewells to the dying,

And mournings for the dead; The heart of Rachel, for her children crying,

Will not be comforted.

LONGFELLOW

WE are living through a time of sorrows untold, a valley of the shadow of death. The World-War is shaking every nation. It is costing an agony of stress and of loss to the peoples actually engaged. Such is the universal upheaval, so are old landmarks altered, that the time before the war, though not a twelvemonth away from us as yet, looks like another era, remote and different. ‘Behold darkness and sorrow, and the light is darkened in the heavens ’ above Europe and the world.

Yet there are uncounted hearts for which this immense public tribulation, although indeed they feel its shock and alarm, is less oppressively sad by far than their own personal sorrows. They cannot help it, and their Maker does not ask them to help it. They love their country, and they pray for it, and some times they tremble for it. But what presses on them most intensely and continuously, and with the heaviest pain, is the thought of the vanished hand and the beloved voice that is still. They feel as if they were buried already in the graves, very likely the unknown graves, of their dearest. And if that utmost grief is spared them, they are thinking day and night of the * missing ’ ones, of whom no tidings come. Or they are tormented with the unbearable recollection of precious lives doomed to the slow misery of the prisoners’ camp, and there too often exposed (if sober witness is to be believed) to privations, to indignities, the imagination of which is as a night mare upon the loving soul. Or they have seen the brave and buoyant son or brother — sent out with all the hopes and prayers of loving pride — sent back maimed for life, or blind beyond hope of sight.

The bereaved, the stricken, the unspeakably disappointed — they know the dreadful difference between to-day and that dear yesterday when all in life seemed to stand erect and flourishing for their beloved ones and for them. Life now is like one of the wrecked dwellings of the battle-country. It is a shattered and blackened home, struck to death by this dire war. Who shall sum the aggregate of such sorrows? Who shall rightly weigh even one unit of anguish, that helps to build up the mass?

It is for hearts thus stricken that I venture to write this little book. And I begin by trying to place before my own heart, in some sort of reality, their bowed and broken multitudes. In the great griefs of life, if one would have the ‘least hope of consoling, one must, however feebly, understand. If one would help at all, one must, in some little measure, share.

I had thought at first of giving in detail a few samples of sorrows of the war known to me personally. I had put down descriptions of three bereavements, each of them being the hero-death of the loved and loving son of one or another old Cambridge friend of mine; young lives, all of splendid promise, cut down like the flower of grass. I had it in mind to tell of the anguish of suspense felt at this moment by a widowed mother over her gallant son, last seen alive defending a trench against hopeless odds, and of whom no word has been heard since. I was going with a great effort to tell the whole story of a baby’s ruthless murder before the eyes of the mother, who was struggling to get the little one home after the declaration of war. That mother is in a private asylum now; her desolate husband, if he still lives, is at the front.

But I do not pursue that plan. I feel sadly sure that, whatever incidents of woe I might produce from my own knowledge, direct or nearly direct, there would be some reader who would say (at least over all but that last incident) that what I, had related looked only gray beside the inky shadow of his or her own desolation. After all, the obituaries in the morning paper are as appealing as anything which I could tell about the bereaved. With a monotony unspeakably moving, they recite the deaths of this and that good soldier; ’ only son,” only child,’ * dear eldest son,” dear youngest son,’ * dearly loved husband.’ And what a multitude which none can number these records represent! In one despatch we were briefly told how six days’ tremendous combat had cost two thousand deaths to our Expeditionary Force. And every one of those lives * belonged to somebody.’ The world is altered from morning into midnight for untold hearts by that one great killing. Kick. ii. There was written therein lamentations, and mourning, and woe.’ So read of the mysterious scroll spread out before Ezekiel’s eyes. For us, any number of the daily newspaper may well be described in the same terms, as we try to realize what is meant by the columns of ’ casualties ’ — that ineffectual word, almost cynically inadequate.

So I will not try to elaborate a picture of my own, marshalling in detail a procession of griefs. If I find the readers whom I presume to seek, personal sufferers and sorrowers in this dark time, that is indeed unnecessary.

I just place before myself the vast phenomenon of a host of bitter personal losses and distresses coming all together. At this moment I do not suggest one detail of consoling thought. I shall do what I can in that way later. But for the present I wish, if only for my own effort’s sake, to place the great shadow full in view. Let me recall deliberately for myself, if any consolation worth the naming is to be offered, the dark realities of the pangs around us, and the riddle, the mystery, of it all.