What does the metaphor "mere drops in the ocean" convey about time?

Read this excerpt from guy de maupassant's "mother savage" about an old woman who takes in four prussian soldiers while her son is away fighting in the french army: but the old woman thought always of her own son, so tall and thin, with his hooked nose and his brown eyes and his heavy mustache which made a roll of black hair upon his lip. she asked every day of each of the soldiers who were installed beside her hearth: "do you know where the french marching regiment, no. 23, was sent? my boy is in it." they invariably answered, "no, we don't know, don't know a thing at all." and, understanding her pain and her uneasiness—they who had mothers, too, there at home—they rendered her a thousand little services. she loved them well, moreover, her four enemies, since the peasantry have no patriotic hatred; that belongs to the upper class alone. the humble, those who pay the most because they are poor and because every new burden crushes them down; those who are killed in masses, who make the true cannon's prey because they are so many; those, in fine, who suffer most cruelly the atrocious miseries of war because they are the feeblest and offer least resistance—they hardly understand at all those bellicose ardors, that excitable sense of honor or those pretended political combinations which in six months exhaust two nations, the conqueror with the conquered. a. a mother’s love has no barriers. b. in war, there are no winners. c. the common man is not patriotic. d. the poor suffer the most in war.