A WAR EPISODE

Feilding Star, Volume XIII, Issue 3340, 8 September 1917, Page 1

A WAR EPISODE

A papier nmche, pine board, tinsel, glass and sky-blue paint temple of midsummer madness bocaino the principal camp for Belgian refugees in London. I was walking through one of its sanded courts with the superintendent when I saw a little old woman. She was sitting on a bench in the sun. She was neatly dressed in a rusty old black dress and a rather dilapidated but carefully adjusted bonnet. She wore black cotton gloves and her hands were folded sedately in her lap. Beside her on the bench was a small black satchel and a bundle done up in a. piece of checked muslin.

"Sending the old lady away?" I asked the superintendent. "No," ho replied. "She is going away. .She has been going away every day now for two years. She i.s waiting for the boat to Belgium and she doesn't intend to miss it. We don't, pay any attention to her anymore; let her do just as she pleases. And she isn't crazy, either. She is less trouble than anyone else in the place. She gets up every morning and makes her bed and cleans up in a scrupulous kind of way that means finality for her, packs her lew belongings, put on her hat and gloves, and comes out here to sit and wait."

And that seems to me the most tragic thing I have seen in the European war zones. The old woman personified for me the waiting thousands of grief-numbed women who will one day hear the long-waited-for call "All aboard" —the sad-eyed thousands who will go back to desolation and waste, where homes were in happy times; go back to look in new graveyards for the names of men whose hearts were once their homes —the only "homes indispensable to their happiness. —Elinor Franklin Egan, in London Weekly Dispatch.