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Of peace I know and can speak,–of peace, with its solace of love, plenty, honor, fame, happiness, and its pathetic tragedy of poverty, heartache, disappointment, tears, bereavement. Of war I know nothing, and never shall know; it is not in my heart of for my hand to break that law which God enjoined from Sinai and Christ confirmed in Galilee. I do not know of war, nor can I tell you of that battle which men with immortal souls fought one glorious day in a fertile country with vineyard hills all round about. But when night fell there was desolation everywhere and death. The Eden was a wilderness; the winding river was choked with mangled corpses; shell and shot had mowed down the acres of waving grain, the exuberant orchards, the gardens and the hedgerows; black, charred ruins, gaunt and ghostlike, marked the spots where homes had stood. The vines had been cut and torn away, and the despoiled hills seemed to crouch down like bereaved mothers under the pitiless gaze of the myriad eyes of heaven.

The victors went their way; a greater triumph was in store for them; a mighty capital was to be besieged; more homes were to be desolated,–more blood shed, more hearts broken. So the victors went their way, their hands red and their immortal souls elated.

In the early dawn a horse came galloping homeward. It is Felice, old Felice, riderless, splashed with mud, wild-eyed, sore with fatigue! Felice, Felice, what horrors hast thou not seen! If thou couldst speak, if that tongue of thine could be loosed, what would it say of those who, forgetful of their souls, sink lower than the soulless brutes! Better it is thou canst not speak; the anguish in thine eyes, the despair in thy honest heart, the fear, the awful fear in thy mother breast,–what tongue could utter them?

Adown the road she galloped,–the same road she had traversed, perhaps, a thousand times before, yet it was so changed now she hardly knew it. Twenty-four hours had ruthlessly levelled the noble trees, the hedgerows, and the fields of grain. Twenty-four hours of battle had done all this and more. In all those ghastly hours, one thought had haunted Felice; one thought alone,–the thought of Petit-Poulain! She pictured him tied in that far-away stall, wondering why she did not come. He was hungry, she knew; her dugs were full of milk and they pained her; how sweet would be her relief when her Petit-Poulain broke his long fast. Petit-Poulain, Petit-Poulain, Petit-Poulain,–this one thought and this alone had old Felice throughout those hours of battle and of horror.

Could this have been the farm-house? It was a ruin now. Shells had torn it apart. Where was the good master Jacques; had he gone with the cure to the defence of the town? And Justine,–where was she? Bullets had cut away the rose-trees and the smoke-bush; the garden was no more. The havoc, the desolation, was complete. The cote, which had surmounted the pole around which an ivy twined, had been swept away. The pigeons now circled here and there bewildered; wondering, perhaps, why Justine did not come and call to them and feed them.

To this seared, scarred spot came old Felice. He that had ridden her into battle lay with his face downward near those distant vineyard hills. His blood had stained Felice’s neck; a bullet had grazed her flank, but that was a slight wound,–riderless, she turned and came from the battle-field and sought her Petit-Poulain once again.

Hard by the ruins of cottage, of garden, and of cote, she came up standing; she was steaming and breathless. She rolled her eyes wildly around,–she looked for the stable where she had left Petit-Poulain. She trembled as if an overwhelming apprehension of disaster suddenly possessed her. She gave a whinny, pathetic in its tenderness. She was calling Petit-Poulain. But there was no answer.

Petit-Poulain lay dead in the ruins of the stable. His shelter had not escaped the fury of the battle. He could not run away, for they had tied him fast when they carried his old mother off. So now he lay amid that debris, his eyes half open in death and his legs stretched out stark and stiff.

And old Felice,–her udder bursting with the maternal grace he never again should know, and her heart breaking with the agony of sudden and awful bereavement,–she staggered, as if blinded by despair, toward that vestige of her love, and bent over him and caressed her Petit-Poulain.