"He had a splinter of shell in his left thigh. He'd been through the whole campaign without a scratch or a day of illness." The woman's eyes sparkled with pride and tenderness. The short man beside me, who informed me he was a native of Beaucaire on the Rhone, had one son wounded and being cared for in a hospital at Caen, a second prisoner in Germany, and two sons-in-law already killed. According to a letter which the dear old flowered shawl spelled out to us word by word, her grandson had been wounded in seven different places, and had had one hand and one leg amputated. But he hastened to add that he was not worrying a bit about it. The young girl's mother had one son in the ranks, and a second, aged seventeen, had enlisted and was about to leave for the front. She and her daughter were on their way to embrace him for the last time. The Belgian soldier was just getting about after an attack of typhoid fever, and the motherly person on my left was travelling towards her husband, a territorial of ripe years whose long nights of vigil beneath bridges and in the mud of the Somme had brought him down with inflammatory rheumatism. Their son, they prayed, was prisoner--having been reported missing since the 30th of August, 1914. This coarse, heavy featured woman of the working classes, cherished her offspring much as a lioness does her young. She told us she had written to the President of the Republic, to her Congressman, her Senator, to the King of Spain, the Norwegian Ambassador, to the Colonel of the Regiment, as well as to all the friends of her son on whose address she had been able to lay hand; and she would keep right on writing until she obtained some result, some information. She could not, would not, admit that her boy was lost; and scarcely stopping to take breath she would ramble on at length, telling of her hopes and her disappointments to which all the compartment listened religiously while slowly the train rolled along through the smiling, undulating Norman country. Each one did what he could to buoy up the mother's hopes. The little Southerner seemed to possess a countless number of stories about prisoners, and he presently proceeded to go into minute detail about the parcels he sent to his own son, explaining the regulation as to contents, measures and weights, with so much volubility that the good soul already saw herself preparing a package to be forwarded to her long lost darling. "You can just believe that he'll never want for anything--if clothes and food will do him any good. There's nothing on earth he can't have if only we can find him, if only he comes back to us." And growing bolder as she felt the wealth of sympathy surrounding her, she looked over and addressed the woman in mourning, who at that moment smiled gently at her. "We thought we knew how much we loved them, didn't we, Madame? But we'd never have realised how really deep it was if it hadn't been for this war, would we?"