When the best, the most compassionate, the wisest among us meet one of these mothers who has just stealthily wiped her eyes, so that the sight of her unhappiness may not offend others who are happier, when we seek for words which, uttered amid the glaring directness of the most awful sorrow that can strike a human heart, shall not sound like odious or ridiculous lies, we can hardly find anything to say to her. We speak to her of the justice and the beauty of the cause for which her hero fell, of the immense and necessary sacrifice, of the remembrance and gratitude of mankind, of the irreality of life, which is measured not by the length of days but by the lofty height of duty and glory. We add perhaps that the dead do not die, that there are no dead, that those who are no more live nearer to our souls than when they were in the flesh and that all that we loved in them lingers in our hearts so long as it is visited by our memory and revived by our love. But, even while we speak, we feel the emptiness of what we say. We are conscious that all this is true only for those whom death has not hurled into the abyss where words are nothing more than childish babble; that the most ardent memory cannot take the place of a dear reality which we touch with our hands or lips; and that the most exalted thought is as nothing compared with the daily going out and coming in, the familiar presence at meals, the morning and evening kiss, the fond embrace at the departure and the intoxicating delight at the return. The mothers know and feel this better than we do; and that is why they do not answer our attempts at consolation and why they listen to them in silence, finding within themselves other reasons for living and hoping than those which we, vainly searching the whole horizon of human certainty and thought, try to bring them from the outside. They resume the burden of their days without telling us whence they derive their strength or teaching us the secret of their self-sacrifice, their resignation and their heroism. THREE UNKNOWN HEROES VI THREE UNKNOWN HEROES 1 The Belgian government published last year a _Reply to the German White Book of 10 May 1915_. This reply gives peremptory and categorical denials to all the allegations in the White Book on the subject of _francs-tireurs_, of attacks by civilians and of the Belgian women’s cruelty to the German prisoners and wounded. It contains a body of authentic and overwhelming evidence upon the massacres at Andenne, Dinant, Louvain and Aerschot which enables history here and now to pronounce its verdict with even greater certainty than the most scrupulous jury of a criminal court.