"I deeply regret to inform you that your son, Lieutenant Oswald Fenimore, was killed in action yesterday while leading his men with the utmost gallantry." I had known him since he was a child. By reason of my wife's kinship, I was "Uncle Duncan." He was just one and twenty, but a couple of years out of Sandhurst. Only a week before I had received an exuberant letter from him extolling his men as "super-devil-angels," and imploring me if I loved him and desired to establish the supremacy of British arms, to send him some of Mrs. Marigold's potted shrimp. And now, there he was dead; and, if lucky, buried with a little wooden cross with his name rudely inscribed, marking his grave. I reached out my hand. "My poor old Anthony!" He jerked his head and glance towards his wife and wheeled me to her side, so that I could put my hand on her shoulder. "It's bitter hard, Edith, but--" "I know, I know. But all the same--" "Well, damn it all!" cried Sir Anthony, in a quavering voice, "he died like a man and there's nothing more to be said." Presently he looked at his watch. "By George," said he, "I've only just time to get to my Committee." "What Committee?" I asked. "The Lord Lieutenant's. I promised to take the chair." For the first time Lady Fenimore lifted her stricken face. "Are you going, Anthony?" "The boy didn't shirk his duty. Why should I?" She looked at him squarely and the most poignant simulacrum of a smile I have ever seen flitted over her lips. "Why not, darling? Duncan will keep me company till you come back." He kissed his wife, a trifle more demonstratively than he had ever done in alien presence, and with a nod at me, went out of the room. And suddenly she burst into sobbing again. "I know it's wrong and wicked and foolish," she said brokenly. "But I can't help it. Oh, God! I can't help it." Then, like an ass, I began to cry, too; for I loved the boy, and that perhaps helped her on a bit. CHAPTER II Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. The tag has been all but outworn during these unending days of death; it has become almost a cant phrase which the judicious shrink from using. Yet to hundreds of thousands of mourning men and women there has been nothing but its truth to bring consolation. They are conscious of the supreme sacrifice and thereby are ennobled. The cause in which they made it becomes more sacred. The community of grief raises human dignity. In England, at any rate, there are no widows of Ashur. All are silent in their lamentations. You see little black worn in the public ways. The Fenimores mourned for their only son, the idol of their hearts; but the manifestation of their grief was stoical compared with their unconcealed desolation on the occasion of a tragedy that occurred the year before.