where the stenches were enough to poison what red blood they had left and there were no medicines to care for the afflicted little bodies, one pities anew those mentally afflicted people who assert at automatic intervals, “I can’t see any difference between the cruelty of the British blockade and the German submarines.”  The resistant powers of the human body, given the bare chance of remaining alive, are little short of phenomenal.  But then, when Nature compounded the human frame it was to fling it into a newborn world far more difficult to survive than even the awful conditions of modern warfare.

Some of these children were wounded before they reached the cellars.  In many cases the families remained in their homes until the walls, at first pierced by the shrapnel, began to tumble about their ears.  Then they would run to the homes of friends on the other side of the town, staying there until the guns, aided by the air scouts, raked such houses as had escaped the first assault.  Often there were no Caves Voutees in the villages.  The mothers cowered with their children under the tottering walls or lay flat on the ground until the German guns turned elsewhere; then they ran for the nearest town.  But during these distracted transfers many received wounds whose scars they are likely to carry through life.  The most seriously wounded were taken to the military hospitals, where they either died, or, if merely in need of bandages, were quickly turned out to make room for some poilu arriving in the everlasting procession of stretchers.

Sometimes, flat on their stomachs, the more curious and intelligent of the children watched the shells sailing overhead to drop upon some beautiful villa or chateau and transpose it into a heap of stones.  Where there were English or Americans in these bombarded towns, or where the Cures or the Mayors of those invaded had not been shot or imprisoned, the children were sent as quickly as possible to Paris, the mothers, when there were any, only too content to let them go and to remain behind and take their chances with the shells.

One little Belgian named Bonduelle, who, with two brothers, reached Paris in safety, is very graphic:  “We are three orphans,” he replied in answer to the usual questions.  “Our uncle and aunt took the place of our dear parents, so soon taken from us....  It was towards the evening of Wednesday, 6th September, 1914, that I was coming back to my uncle’s house from Ypres, when all at once I heard shrieks and yells in the distance.  I stopped, for I was like one stunned.  On hearing behind me, on the highway, German cavalry, I ran into a house where I spent the night.  I could not close my eyes when I thought of the anxiety of my uncle and aunt and of the fate of my two small brothers, Michael and Roger.  Early the following day I rushed to our house.  Everybody was in the cellar.  We shed tears on meeting again.  I found two of my cousins wounded by a shell which had exploded outside our door.  Soon another shell comes and smashes our house.  I was wounded.  Dazed with fear, my cousin and myself got out through a window from the cellar, we ran across fields and meadows to another uncle, where the rest of the family followed us soon.  We remained there the whole winter, but what a sad winter!  We have not taken off our clothes, for at every moment we feared to have to run away again.