sfolk dear.
Hard work an honour, in her duty clear
To wives of brothers in the fighting line;
Women and children gather round her here;
For round their hearts her nature did entwine,
Her beaming face proclaimed 'See, Anglaise, they are mine.'

And all around these chubby children play,
Dirty, but happy, fed and cared for well,
With ne'er a troubled thought the live-long day,
For they know little of adjacent hell.
The hunchback warns us we are not to tell
About the 'Allemagne' whilst they are nigh,
Since all have known him in the past too well.
'Let them forget it as we often try.
_C'est la guerre_,' she said, and quickly brushed her eye.

And then she whispers, as we loiter near,
The story of their young lives years ago,
When, snatched from cradles, with a frenzied fear,
Their mothers hurried on before the foe;
Their men defend and screen them as they go,
And fight a rearguard action with the brute,
Who cares not for their agony or woe,
But only for the blood-streams and the loot.
And now she sees us watching one poor little mute:
'Ah! this one?' and she pointed to the dot
Who sat alone, and smiled to vacant space,
'Waits for her mother; very hard her lot;
For years now has she waited in her place.
"Where is her mother?" I can never trace
Somewhere beyond across "the no man's way."
Some day, perhaps,' she cried, with yearning face.
The tiny mite, tho' happy, could not play,
Except with little restless hands all day.

'Sometimes the shell come here right by,' she said.
'The other day, when I what you call wash,
A big boom quickly pass above my head,
And fall out in the field with a big crash.
But, oh, those children, they so very rash,
They know so little of the dreadful doom.
I come in time to save a fearful crash,
And catch them with the nose-cap in this room--
The nose-cap, unexhausted, from the boom.'

And then we start, inclined to say farewell.
We try to brighten up the little maid
Who sits alone, perhaps in faerie dell;
For she doth seem not in the least afraid.
She, smiling, takes the pennies which we lay
Within her hands, tho' distant is her smile;
And for a space she seemed with them to play,
But drops them ere we're scarcely gone, awhile
We w