The Garden of Swords by Max Pemberton

Helene of Strasburg was dead, the Mother of the City, the queenly woman who had helped the city so often to courage and self-sacrifice. Though Strasburg suffered then, though her people lived no longer in the light of day but burrowed to the cellars and the vaults where no Prussian shells could harm them, they came forth as a great army of the children of night into the sunshine which hovered about the open grave. For they had loved the mistress of the house of Goersdorf, and to many of them she was as one of their own, ever to be held in the high place of memory where all that has made for the sweetness and the truth of life should be stored up.

Helene was dead. The news went quickly as tidings of the ultimate misfortune. The soldiers on the ramparts heard it, and told each other that the day of the cataclysm was at hand. The brave men of the city took a new resolution of endurance. "We shall avenge the shell that struck down her house," they said. In the churches the priests spoke of Christian love and of the divine truth that in motherhood all love is born. When the body was at length carried forth and the drums rolled and the bells tolled, it was as though the whole city came out for that _cortege_. Even the children cast flowers upon the path. The Governor himself, the dauntless Uhrich whose name was honoured then almost above any name in France, was first at the graveside and last to leave the stricken house when the people had gone to the darkness again.