SHATTERED BY AVAR.

Waipawa Mail, Volume XXXVII, Issue 7919, 16 August 1917, Page 3

SHATTERED BY AVAR.

FAMISHED AND “JUMPY.” PITIFUL VILLAGE CHILDREN OF NORTHERN FRANCE. The French children found in the villages of Northern France, evacunted by the Germans under the pressure of the British and French offensives, present a picture of the 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 home or relatives. Many have been grievously wounded. Most of them suffer from a peculiar species of shell-shock, which afflicts them generally with a sort of tremor not unlike St. Vitus dance.

They have had life and death, horrors human and inhuman, revealed to them in guises so terrible that they Anil ne\’er 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 the 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 these long months and years has been bad enough, but the condition of the half-starved, Avounded, mentally deranged little children has been far Avorse. All the children were collected and shepherded by the first Entente troops into the newly occupied areas. Everything that can be done to cure and care for them is now being done, constituting one of the most important immediate tasks of the French committees on reconstruction. The first step was to remove them well behind the front areas. Those who were orphans were taken far away from the sight and sound of shells, many of them to the south of France. The mildest cases were there put under the care of farm mothers. The more serious cases must be kept under close medical supervision in special institutions. Chilren 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 Avere placed on farms near by, where it is possible for the parents to visit them frequently.

MERE SHADOWS OF CHILDHOOD One French organisation has a hospital with 400 child patients, all under twelve 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 anaemia under which they rapidly Avaste aAvay.

“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 Avar than to see these mutilated little victims who Avill 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 or start at any noise or sudden movement. Women are alAvays gentle with children, but with these children Ave 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 shell-shock, showed no improvement until after he had been in the hospital for seven weeks. Then one day he opened his eyes after a long sleep, and said with a twisted smile, to the nurse, “It is—very—quiet hero; I—like—it.”

Cases like that encourage the nurses. But there arc many sadder cases—child patients whose 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.

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