FRENCH WOMEN UNDER GUN FIRE.

Colonist, Volume LVII, Issue 13731, 20 March 1915, Page 2

FRENCH WOMEN UNDER GUN FIRE.

An officer who has spent the last month of two amongst the ruins and flooded fields in the North of France told me yesterday that it was almost incredible how indifferent the population had become to the perpetual bombardment to which they are subjected.

Many of the villages, he said, resembled nothing more than a very large brickyard in which the stacks had been overthrown and tumbled about. Such of the population as have remained are living mostly in the most miserable sorts of shelters set up at a little distance outside the. ordinary marks for German fire. These are mostly women and children, especially old women. "Only a day or two ago," he remarked, "I saw six old creatures, not one of them under 60, moving in a line bent nearly double, rooting beets out of the ground. There was a geod deal of firing in the neighbourhood, and just as I was passing a big 150-milhmetre shell fell in the field, certainly not more than 70 yards away from the women, and covering them with a shower of eafth and stones. If you will believe me, not one of them even raised her head, but all continued stolidly creeping on with their work."

A correspondent of the "Liberte" quite confirms this account of the indifference of what is left of the peasant population ■ to the extraordinary perils of their present existence.

"There was a bright spring sun shining," continued the narrator of these experiences, "in strange contrast with the surrounding misery. iln the limpid sky a hostile aeroplane was hovering over our batteries, which it was trying to discover. It was being greeted with a bombardment, and our shells bursting all round it flecked the blue with thick white fleeces. Soon some French aeroplanes came into sight and compelled the German to make off. Explosions far and near, accompanied, or rather preceded, by a characteristic low whistle, were witness to the activity of the German batteries. 'That is the twenty-first "marmite" which has burst over the village to-day,' said a passing officer, as a big shell exploded about 300 yards off. I went past the village laundry, where woman, young and old, and even children, were lustily thrashing their wet linen. 'Well! Are you not afraid of the shells ?' 'Oh, no; we are accustomed to them, and no longer; take any notice'; and another added: j 'For sure we can't remain dirty just because the Germans are there' " —

"Standard."