FRANCE'S JUVENILE BATTALIONS

Levin Daily Chronicle, 19 October 1918, Page 1

FRANCE'S JUVENILE BATTALIONS

GLIMPSES OF FRENCH CHILDREN.

French villages do not take kindly") as a rule, to the long, straight, bleak tree-lined highways, but prefer to tuck themselves away along the narrow, twisting by-roads which bring back now a Devonshire lane, at other times a Wiltshire by-way, or again recalls a bit of typical Dorset. As your car lurches round the bend, past the first outlying red tiled barn with its disintegrating mud walls and its clumsy skeleton of rotting timbers . showing through, you come across the children. Half-a-dozen solemn, large-eyed, intelligent little folk, not playing, not singing, never by any chance gesticulating or jabbering as we imagine Latin children always do, but leaping with lightning speed to the shelter of the gutter—for pathways there are none. They stand as you lumber by—incurious but. intelligentlooking, and witli an odd, eifish dignity all their own. They look, but never 'stare, at you as you pass, and it is not until the little fair-haired unbreeched tot —with the poilu's sky-blue fatigue cap half hiding his curls—salutes you with grave military precision; that you realise you are not unmarked. Tfkosc sky blue caps on tiny golden heads are one of the most pathetic little touches of the French countryside, today. You meet them in every hamlet, and the clothing department of the great military machine of Franco obviously turns a blind eye to this wholesale depredation of Government stores. They come, of. course,, from the French father, or elder brother homo on his rare furlough from the hell just over the skyline beyond. And what father bidding that little golden-haired fellow adieu could resist the plea, "Father, you promised me your blue cap before you went." And in a twinkling there is recruited a new soldier for France full of childish visions of how he is going to fight "when he is grown up." Rising "four-is apparently the age when the martial headgear is first assumed. There is a sad disproportion indeed in size between cap and head, and there is a provoking tendency for the former to> sag over the new recruit 'a neck in an extremely unsoldicr-like manner. Much can be done, however, by a careful bunching of curls, and the tyro with projecting ears has two hea-ven-sent supporters against lateral doflection ready at hand. A firm and straight carriage .is instantly adopted to conform with military ideals. Besides, the stiffer you , walk the less chance there is of the cap sitting down on your shoulders and making you look like a civilian. Once formally adoptee, the cap must always'be worn—-in rain, in sunshine, on Sundays, on weekdays, going to school, or merely taking the air just outside the house. Bigger boys who wear real collars and have ties sometimes affect a certain disdain of this infantile militarism, and a naval touch is distinctly "nuttish" at 12 or 13. The cap adopted is something like what a deck-hand in a fourth-rate tramp steamer might buy if he were too drunk to know any better. It is certainly the most hideous cap in the world. And it lacks the something, and the illegality, of purloined Government clothing. It is merely a bagman 's line from some cheap, shoddy tailoring manufactory of a smoky town, and has about as much reminiscence of the salt sea as a bowler has. In their heart of hearts those blase youths bitterly regret that they have forsworn the sky-blue canoe-shaped cap they once took such pride in. •

The ethics of the sky-blue cap involve one cosmic law. Never must it bo worn by a girl. The male child of four may assume it and wear it with youthful self-consciousness; _ he docs so in virtue of his sex. He is a son of France, a soldier in posse, the saviour of his coiintry, and the pr - tector of his womankind. His ten-year-old sister may admire it, look at it, handle it, even try it on in secret, but to wear it outside would be to trifle with the dignity of the army which is in her baby brother's keeping. Lucky little ones of France, if you but knew your good fortune. For you will tell your children's children of the days of the Great "War and of the roar of the guns, and of how yen were alivo at the most glorious period <> f aJI the glorious history of your native land. And for the tiny, favourite, golden-haired grandchild there will perhaps one day -will be taken from the old oak press just a shabby, faded, oldfashioned, sky-blue soldier's cap. Who kuows?