She must have witnessed the little byplay; perhaps she had a son of her own in service.

There were mighty few mothers in France last fall who did not have sons in service.
Yet one of the few really humorous recollections of this war that I preserve had to do with a hospital too; but this hospital was in England and we visited it on our way home to America.

We went--two of us--in the company of Lord Northcliffe, down into Surrey, to spend a day with old Lord Roberts.

Within three weeks thereafter Lord Roberts was dead where no doubt he would have willed to die--at the front in France, with the sound of the guns in his ears, guarded in his last moments by the Ghurkas and the Sikhs of his beloved Indian contingent.

But on this day of our visit to him we found him a hale, kindly gentleman of eighty-two who showed us his marvelous collection of firearms and Oriental relics and the field guns, all historic guns by the way, which he kept upon the terraces of his mansion house, and who told us, among other things, that in his opinion our own Stonewall Jackson was perhaps the greatest natural military genius the world had ever produced.