“Dad, oh, dad,” he whispered. “Do you know--do you know--Oh, God, tell him how I love him. Tell him! Tell him! I never could.”
The little V. A. D. came softly and stood looking from a distance. Then coming to the bedside, she laid her hand upon the head and then the heart of the dead man. Then she drew back, and beckoning to an orderly, they placed a screen about the cot. She let her eyes rest for a moment or two upon the kneeling boy, then went softly away.
Death was to her an all too familiar thing. She had often seen it unmoved, but to-night, as she walked away, the brown eyes could not hold their tears.
Barry was standing beside his father's grave, in a little plot in the Boulogne cemetery set apart for British officers. They had, one by one, gone away and left him until, alone, he stood looking down on the simple wooden cross on which were recorded the name, age, and unit of the soldier with the date of his death, and underneath the simple legend, eloquent of heroic sacrifice, “Died of wounds received in action.”
Throughout the simple, beautiful burial service he had not been acutely conscious of grief. Even now he wondered that he could shed no tears. Rather did an exultant emotion fill his soul as he looked around upon the little British plot, with its rows of crosses, and he was chiefly conscious of a solemn, tender pride that he was permitted to share that glorious offering which his Empire was making for the saving of the world. But, in this moment, as he stood there alone close to his father's grave, and surrounded by those examples of high courage and devotion, he became aware of a mighty change wrought in him during these last three days. He had experienced a veritable emancipation of soul. He was as if he had been born anew.
The old sense of failure in his work, the feeling of unfitness for it, and the old dread of it, had been lifted out of his soul, and not only was he a new man, but he felt himself to be charged with a new mission, because he had a new message for his men. No longer did he conceive himself as a moral policeman or religious censor, whose main duty it was to stand in judgment over the faults and sins of the men of his battalion. No more would the burden of his message be a stern denunciation of these faults and sins. Standing there to-day, he could only wonder at his former blindness and stupidity and pride.