Most Americans, including no doubt the President, can only imagine the grief of that is being suffered by Myeshia Johnson as she prepares to bury her husband, Sergeant La David Johnson. He was one of four United States Army soldiers killed in an ambush at Niger. He gave his life for his country, and its citizens will honor him as long as there is an America.

That is no doubt what animated President Trump to telephone Mrs. Johnson this week. According to a congressman who says she was with Mrs. Johnson during the President’s call, Mr. Trump said at one point that the sergeant “knew what he signed up for” and added, “when it happens it hurts anyway.” The congresswoman, Frederica Wilson, has been seeking to portray that in a negative way.

The congresswoman may have her own reasons for such cynicism (she is reportedly one of the Democrats who boycotted Mr. Trump’s presidential inauguration). We, though, have no doubt that Mr. Trump was seeking only to condole, and to compliment Sergeant Johnson. That the sergeant knew the dangers he’d signed up for is precisely a mark of his courage.

Hard though it may be, millions of Americans — including some of our greatest artists — have tried to imagine, to share, the grief that Mrs. Johnson is suffering. We ourselves were reminded of the telegrams scene in “We Were Soldiers Once and Young,” Mel Gibson’s masterpiece about Colonel Hal Moore’s leadership in the 7th United States Cavalry during the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley.

It portrays Moore’s wife in officers row at Fort Benning, as the Western Union man starts delivering the telegrams to the new war widows. It is a scene of breath-taking poignancy. Then we went up on the Web and read President Lincoln’s letter to Mrs. Bixby, who’d lost five sons in the Civil War. Surely it is one of the greatest documents in America’s long history.

“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,” Lincoln wrote. “But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.” Then for Mrs. Bixby the commander-in-chief prayed “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.”