The Mother

October 1916

It was ten years since he had gone out, a lithe, dark-haired lad, to whom the cramped life of an office had proved an abomination not to be endured. To many of us it had come to seem a very long time ago, and he a very long way away. Then one morning his Mother told us, with that half-proud, half-frightened smile, which so many mothers wore just then,
"Donald is coming with the Australians."
And suddenly the two-fold gulf of years and distance was bridged, and it needed but to set his name beneath his brother's on the Roll of Honour to make him one of that little circle to whom our thoughts would henceforth turn at the words of intercession, "For all who are serving this nation, and especially for those gone forth from this Church and congregation."
In that dim sanctuary, where they had once sat beside her, she tried to realise this new and world-shattering thing, that the sons she had borne and nurtured should be soldiers, that at the call this strange replying Thing should have wakened to life in them, making them seem almost strangers to her. How many mothers looked on their sons in those first ardent days and felt that they had never really known them until then? Was it otherwise even with the French women, whose lifelong creed had taught them, 'A man shall love his Country first and after that his Mother?' She gave us news of Donald from time to time; he was in training; he had moved to another camp; finally he had sailed. Then came the first great disappointment; he had been landed at Egypt - he was not coming to England after all. Still he seemed a little nearer than in Australia, and he sent her long, rather bored letters and picture post-cards of the Sphinx and the Pyramids. At any rate, he was seeing the world.

He survived in the landing, and for long months she knew that he was on the Peninsula. Well for her, and for countless other Mothers, that there was so much she could not know, that her eyes were holden, and even her imagination incapable of picturing that Gehenna, where once our race endured to the uttermost, and where the flower of the army lies in sepulchre. He went down at last, shattered by a Turkish shell, and the Sister wrote from Cairo that his condition was very serious. But the Mother could only wait; for her there could be no hurried journey, no arrival at hospital, no keeping watch beside him.
"Ah," we said, "if he dies now, before she has seen him again, it will be too hard!"
Surely the last words of human desolation finds voice in that childish thought before the Calvary - 'Where Thy very Mother could do nought for Thee."

They cabled at last that his case was hopeless and she must prepare for the worst. In France his brother was facing death in some of the most desperate fighting of the year. But we knew that the strength of a world other than this upheld her in that hour of unutterable suspense, and that her prayers knocked ceaselessly upon the gates of Heaven for them both - knocked, and at length prevailed. As by a miracle, Donald rallied. Step by step he fought his way back to life. Doctor and nurse stood amazed as before one all but risen from the dead. They sent her a photograph of him at last, scarcely recognisable in its extreme emaciation and premature age. But it showed him out of bed, and they wrote that he was learning to walk again, with the slow and faltering steps of the child she had steadied so many years before. Later he wrote himself, but his letters were few and far between, and after a time there came a longer interval than before.

And then one midday she came to us, a telegram in her hand. He was in England - in hospital some twenty miles away. I am supposed to be an authority on hospitals, and she came to ask whether I thought they would let her in if she went then and there without waiting for a pass.
"If it were our hospital I am quite sure they would," I told her with conviction, "and I can't imagine there is any hospital where they'd keep you out if you told them you hadn't seen him for ten years."
"Then I shall go now!" she said.
One of us found a timetable, and we looked her out a train, and watched her set out with an excitement akin to her own. Often and often I helped to send such a telegram from the Hospital post office. Today for the first time I was, so to speak, at the other end of the wire, and could see what happened when it reached its destination.

Late that night I was going back to the Hospital, and on the way I called to ask how she had fared. It had been a longer and more tiresome journey than we had expected, but she had reached the hospital safely and asked for her son. Motherlike, it had never occurred to her that there could be two of his name, and, after prolonged search in the grounds, they had presented her triumphantly with the wrong man!
"But they were all very kind," she said, "and after that they took me to a ward. It was getting rather late, but I was explaining to the Sister when suddenly I saw him. And, oh, my dear, weren't we pleased to see one another!"


We sat silent in the quiet lamplit room, but how often since have those simple, but all expressive, words come back to me as I have caught a glimpse of such reunions in this Hospital. One likes to think that in another Homeland those other sons, who did not come back from Gallipoli, are waiting for the mothers whom Death, no more than time or distance, can keep from them at last.
"Well, there is one redeeming feature about this beastly war," I reflected, stepping out into the darkness, through which the dark pile of the Hospital loomed up against a palid sky - "it does bring the Colonials home as nothing else could, and gives the mothers a chance to see their boys again. It isn't quite all sad."

H. M. NIGHTINGALE