CHILDREN AT THE FRONT

Horowhenua Chronicle, 30 May 1916, Page 3

CHILDREN AT THE FRONT

1 Children are often at the front in France, or rather the front comes to them. The boys and girls prefer to remain in the place they bare known even when it ie assaulted) by shell, than to move away. When forced to go by the military authorities, they depart unwillingly. The ruins of their own house are all the world to hom. In many a shattered cottage window there is now a board, on which is written : '•Poetclardfi. omV<ts, riting-paper For Sale." Thus the older people try to keep on "business as usual" or neither "more than usual," as they perhaps diid not keep the shop before. The children are sent out with stocks of chocolate aind cigarettes and postcards of ruined towns, with which to waylay the tired hokliars who have finished their turn in the trenches. fcSome of these juvenile merchants have erectedl open-air stalls along .the highway to the tiring line, by the simple process of setting a plank across I two boxen or piles ot stones. Their wares are arrayed in neat rows, and they sit ibehind them solemnly, making change and conducting negotiations in quaint fragments of English. They like to be chaffed, hut they know how many sous make a franc. They unKteflsfjand the language of shells as weli as the eoldiars. They know when the warning whistle overhead has the note of real danger, and 3'ou will see them flatten their poor little bodies under the shelter of a we'll, wait for the explosion, perhaps in the next field, then, when the eptintors are spent, return calmly to their post. Beit/ween ithe bombardmsnfte ithey t:iugjh and quarrel among themselves like any other children, amd great is the competition among them when a fresh battalion hfclt® momentarily 011 its way to or from the trendies. .Lately a distinguished neutrai motored through a village that had been uselessly bomlbarded by the Germans. Shells had just faUen near the street tnrough which he passed; one had torn •a hale in the paving, and the foofway was strewn with bits of brick. Some twenty or thirty boys and girls in their Sunday e'othes (they still wear bunt lay clothes, even in front of the British guns) were crowded around « large woodien shed a few feet distant. He thought some of them must have been killed or injured by the dialling of a quarter of an hour before. Not at all. They were waiting for a cinema to open I