“SAVE OUR CHILDREN.”

Shannon News, 28 April 1922, Page 4

“SAVE OUR CHILDREN.”

RUSSIAN MOTHERS’ PLEA

The famous war correspondent, Sir Phillip Gibbs, has described the plight of 300,000 Russian children who were getting barely enough to keep bodj and soul togethex*, even though l£d per day would save an adult and a child, or eight saved for a shilling. Sir Phillip saw children fed on bread made of leaves and yellow clay. In another district, where the people were dying like flies by hundreds,, the joy of the children at the .sight of food was touching to see. Miss Thorpe had given harrowing descriptions of scenes she had witnessed in Russia, as had also • Miss Fry, the noted Red Cross nurse, in one case the authorities selected one child out of four from a number cf 70,000, these being, the strongest ones, the other three having to be left to starve, as there was not an ounce of food to spare for them —not a fraction of an ounce. Children and rummaged the garbage heaps foi food, and everwhere death by starvation was occurring on a wholesale scale Mr Arthur Watts, -general secretary of the Society of Friends, teported that 15 million people in one district must die of starvation. Ninety per cent of the children from one to three years of age had died oi starvation. , ' , A letter the Volga district, signed by forty-one mothers, said, in part. “Save our children! O for the mercy of the blessed Jesus who loved the little ones—save our children! We should feel warm this winter ip our nakedness if we knew our children had clotb®s; we should feel well fed, dying from hunger, if we knew our children ha<Jl fopd. W-e will gladly die, it is best that we should die —if only our children may live. O mothers, Christian mothers, save our children! Save our children!”