SHATTERED BY WAR

Otago Daily Times, Issue 17089, 22 August 1917, Page 10

SHATTERED BY WAR

FAMISHED AND '-JUMPY." PITIFUL VILLAGE CHILDREN OF NORTHERN FRANCE. The French children found in the villages of Northern France, evacuated by the Germans under the pressure of the British and French offensives, present a picture of tho savagery of modern warfare as characteristic as the Somme forest —shattered and broken by months of shell fire. Many of these children, writes the special correspondent of the New York Evening Post, are orphans without homo or relatives. Many have been grievously wounded. Most of them suffer from a peculiar species of shell-shook, which afflicts them generally with a sort of tremor not unlike St. Vitus dance. Thoy have had life and death, horrors human and inhuman, revealed to them in guises so terrible that they will never be quite normal again. All are under-fed and frail from confinement in cellars. Cut off suddenly from relatives and friends perhaps two years ago, they have continued to live within a few hundred yards of tho front lines, listening always to the noise of shells and the crashing of explosives, until their idea of heaven is "a place that is very quiet." IMMEDIATE CARE. The condition of peasant men and women who have been living under the shadow of the invader through those long months and years has been bad enough, but tho condition of the half-starved, wounded, mentally deranged little children has been far worse.

All the children were collected and shepherded by tho first Entente troops into tho newly occupied areas. Everything that can be done to euro and care for them is now\ being done, constituting one of the most important immediate tusks of the French committees on reconstruction. The first step was to remove them well behind tho front areas. Those who were orphans were taken far away from the sight and sound of shells, many of them to tho south of France. The mildest cases were thero put under tho care of farm mothers. Tho more serious cases must be kept under close medical supervision in special institutions. Children who were not orphans were not usually taken away from the district. Mothers or grandmothers could not bear to part with them altogether, so they were placed in farms near by, where it is possible for tho parents to visit them frequently. MERE SHADOWS OF CHILDHOOD. One French organisation has a hospital with 400 child patients, all under 12 years of age. Most of them are wounded. Some have lost legs or arms, others their sight, others are suffering from brain fever, or an anosmia under which they rapidly waste away. They are the victims of the ruthlessness of modern warfare," said the head of the hospital, a French woman wearing the uniform of the French Red Cross. ™ There is no better argument against war than to see these mutilated little viotims who will never play or enjoy life, as other children do. They are mere shadows of childhood. It is difficult to make them talk, and they tremble and start at any or sudden'movement. Women are always gentle with children, but with thee© children wp need a special gentleness as_ if we were' handling something more fragile than the most delicate china." One of the patients, a five-year-old boy, who had been rendered dumb from shellshock, showed no improvement until after he had been in the hospital for seven weeks. Then one day he opened his eyes after a lonjr sleep, and said with a twisted smile, to the nurse: "It is—very—quiet here; I—like—it."

Cases like that encourage the nurses. But there are many sadder cases—child patients whoso wounds must inevitably prove fatal, patients who, despite every effort, grow steadily weaker, patients who are gradually losing their reason and whom nothing can save.