The cry was taken up far and near over the fields. Most of the harvesters started toward the road and with them went Henriette and Helen and Phil. But not Madame Pigou. She stood watching the figures all of a pattern in their uniforms, moving like automatons sharp cut against the skyline, and then bent to her work. Her son could not be among these battalions. She knew that he was in Alsace. Buxom peasant girls and toothless old men and women standing by the roadside called out the joyful God-speed of their hearts to the soldiers of France. The men in their red trousers and blue coats knew nothing of where they were going; and the gunners astride their horses and seated on the gun-carriages and caissons looked as if they did not care, if only action soon came. Still they kept coming, that myriad-legged, human caterpillar, its convolutions following the grade of the road in either direction to the horizon. It seemed a creature of irresistible man-power and still coming, when the cousins started back to their field. "They are between us and the Germans, those brave fellows!" said Madame Pigou, her features in a transport of joy, with a long look toward the moving blue silhouettes sharpened now by the low sun. What more was there to say? "I hope we shall not see them driven back," Helen whispered in English. She took the lead in insisting that Madame Pigou stop work. If she did not, they would not help her to-morrow. They walked back to the village with her. "In America the women do not work in the fields," Phil managed to say in French. "What do they do?" asked Madame Pigou. "Ah, I understand. They are all rich." Jean who had gone ahead came running toward them with a letter which the postman had left during the day at the cottage. There was an inarticulate explosion of breath from Helen. She had recognised the nature of the letter, though the peasant woman had not. "The first in our village!" Helen whispered to Phil. He understood her meaning. How could they ease the blow for the mother was their thought, as her calloused fingers tore open the envelope? There was no way. They had to watch it fall. "Dead on the field of honour!" she repeated to herself. She half closed her eyes as silently she adjusted herself to fate's decree, then folded the message and placed it in her bosom. "It is for France! It is war!" she said, this woman of a race that knows well what war is and what it brings. "Jean, you must be my man, now. Armand is dead!" Jean, hoarse from cheering the battalion on the road, nestled against his mother. "Thank you for helping me!" she said simply, turning to the others. Her stoicism seemed to have its roots in the soil itself, tilled and fought for by centuries of ancestors. But the suppressed suffering in her eyes as she spoke had brought the war nearer to Mervaux than the throb of marching infantry and the thunder of guns and nearer to Phil than anything he had seen or felt before.