Distraught: Amy Beechey received the news of each of her sons' deaths with sadness
The Mother Who Lost Five Sons: On Armistice Day, The Heartbreaking Story Of The Biggest Loss By A British Family In The Great War -- Daily Mail
The moment Amy Beechey saw the envelope with a French postmark she feared the worst. Sent from a military hospital in Rouen, dated December 29, 1917, it brought the news she had been dreading.
Her son, 36-year-old Rifleman Leonard Beechey, wounded and gassed at the battle of Cambrai a month earlier, had died of his wounds. Tetanus set in and the doctors could do nothing to save him.
He would, the chaplain told his mother, be buried in Rouen, far from the Lincolnshire countryside where he and his seven brothers had grown up, together with five sisters (a sixth sister had died aged five).
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My Comment: Words always escape me when I read stories like this one. U.S. President Lincoln's letter to Mrs. Bixby .... a mother who also lost 5 sons .... is probably the closest that one can come to in understanding this loss. The letter is posted below ....
Executive Mansion,
Washington, Nov. 21, 1864.
Dear Madam,
I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.
Yours, very sincerely and respectfully,
A. Lincoln