m villages lying in the path of
the advancing hordes to the neighboring towns, and there separated,
crowding into the nearest Caves Voutees. Most of these poor women
carried a baby and were distraught with fear besides; the older
children must cling to the mother's skirts or become lost in the
melee.

When one considers that many of these children, in Rheims or Verdun,
for instance, were in cellars not for weeks but for months, without
seeing the light of day, with their hunger never satisfied, with
corpses unburied for days until a momentary lull encouraged the elders
to remove the sand bags at the exit and thrust them out, with their
refuge rocking constantly and their ear-drums splitting with raucous
sounds, 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