"FRENCH RABBITS."

New Zealand Herald, Volume LIII, Issue 16205, 15 April 1916, Page 2 (Supplement)

"FRENCH RABBITS."

A TOUCHING EPISODE.

CHILDREN OF WAR. I - lady Inglis' narrative of her expert eu.es during the siege of Lucknow, half a century ago, nothing caught the attention of the public more generally than her description of how quickly the children in tho beleaguered residency became accustomed to living under fire. They lost all fear of bullets, were only momentarily startled by the crash of a shell close at hand, and used to beg hard for the privilege of leaving the more sheltered women's quarters to play in a little enclosed garden, despite the fact that their swing had been carried away and their pet goat slain there by cannon fire, while bullets pattered so frequently against the walls that it had ceased to be fun to run and pick them up while they were yet hot. Before the siege ended, some of their little playmates had been killed and some wounded; but the survivors, pining in the heated rooms, were not a whit less eager for tig and hopscotch in their dangerous playground.

Soldiers Adopt Waifs. Few, indeed, were the children who shared the perils of that time compared with those endangered, injured, and slain in the fearful European war of to-day, Leaving aside atrocities, or intentional injuries to children—*of which one an scarcely bear to think—the exigencies of warfare along so many hundred miles of trenches, running through so many ruined and half-ruined villages, have brought many scores of children within the danger zone. Often they become, like the Lucknow children, quite fearless, learning to disregard the most terrifying sights and sounds. They help their mothers to work in the fields under fire quite as a matter of course; and it is their frequent tendency, with the natural curiosity of childhood, rather to approach the firing-line than to keep away from it. Despite rules and orders, they occasionally reach the second, and oven the first, line of defence, and pay surreptitious visits to the soldiers in tho trenches. There they arc- both scolded and welcomed. In some cases orphan waifs have been as individual, company, or regimental pets and mascots. So numerous are the children who haunt the lines in certain regions that the soldiers have nick-named them "trench rabbits."

"Monsieur Tommoe." Not always do the poor little " rabbits" escape unscathed from their dangerous tasks in the open, or from associating with their soldier chums. Wounded children are not common; yet unfortunately they are not very rare in the hospitals near the front. When thev are brought in, a nurse has testified, they are often clinging tightly for consolation to the toys contrived or carved for them by their grown-up playfellows in the trenches in the monotonous hours of waiting between assaults.

One little lad, wounded in the foot by shrapnel, went under ether to have his mangled toes removed, still clutching tightly in his hand a woolly lamb, made for him by a British "Tommy" from a scrap of his own torn sheepskin coat and a few bits of whittled wood. As the child's fingers relaxed it was removed and forgotten. But no sooner had he recovered con. sciousness than his first inquiry and demand was. " Where is my lamb ? I want my lamb that Monsieur fomjnee made for me."

The lamb was found but it had been allowed to fall to the floor, and the white fleece was stained with blood. The nurse offered to wash it off, but the little fellow was not willing to wait. i "Let me have my lamb now," ha pegged. -"-You can tie a bandage round Trim, and I will play that wo pave both been wounded by the enemies of our country." ' When his friend, "Monsieur Tommee Atkins," and " Monsieur Tommee's" comrades heard about it, they made a number of other lambs and sent them to the hospital, so that the boy's convalescence was I cheered by shepherding a noble flock, of I which he never tired, among the hills and I valleys of the " Land of Counterpane."