l
Castel volunteered. The organization was formed and christened, Mrs.
Bliss provided Relief Depots in Paris, and Mr. Coudert returned to New
York for a brief visit in search of funds.

During the bombardment of the Belgian and French towns these children
came into Paris on every train. They were tagged like post-office
packages, and it was as well they were, not only because some were too
little to know or to pronounce their names correctly, but even the
older ones were often too dazed to give a coherent account of
themselves; although the more robust quickly recovered. The first
thing to do with this human flotsam was to wash and disinfect and feed
it, clip its hair to the skull, and then, having burned the rags of
arrival, dress it in clean substantial clothes. While I was in Paris
Mr. Jaccaci and Mrs. Hill were meeting these trains; and, when the
smaller children arrived frightened and tearful they took them in
their arms and consoled them all the way to the Relief Depots. The
result was that they needed the same treatment as the children.

It was generally the Cure or the Mayor of the bombarded towns that had
rounded up each little parentless army and headed it toward Paris.
When the larger children were themselves again they all told the same
bitter monotonous stories. Suddenly a rain of shrapnel fell on their
village or town. They fled to the cellars, perhaps to the one Cave
Voutee (a stone cellar with vaulted roof) and there herded in
indescribable filth, darkness, fear, hunger for weeks and even months
at a time. The shelling of a village soon stopped, but in the larger
towns, strategic points desired of the enemy, the bombarding would be
incessant. Mothers, or older children, would venture out for food,
returning perhaps with enough to keep the pale flame of life alive, as
often as not falling a huddled mass a few feet from the exit of the
cellar. Mothers died of typhoid, pneumonia, in childbirth; others
never had reached the cellar with their own children in the panic; one
way or another these children arrived in Paris in a state of
orphanhood, although later investigations proved them to have been
hiding close to their mother (and sometimes father; for all men are
not physically fit for war) by the width of a street, in a town where
the long roar of guns dulled the senses and the affections, and the
constant hail of shrapnel precluded all search for anything but food.

Moreover, many families had fled fro