Through villages swarming with troops and packed with ordnance we arrived at an old caserne, which has been converted into the children’s hospital of the district.  It is in charge of one of the first of America’s children’s specialists.  While he works among the refugees, his wife, who is a sculptress, makes masks for the facially mutilated.  He has brought with him from the States some of his students, but his staff is in the main cosmopolitan.  One of his nurses is an Australian, who was caught at the outbreak of hostilities in Austria and because of her knowledge, despite her nationality, was allowed to help to organise the Red Cross work of the enemy.  Another is a French woman who wears the Croix de Guerre with the palm.  She saved her wounded from the fury of the Hun when her village was lost, and helped to get them back to safety after it had been recaptured.  The Matron is Swedish and Belgian.  The ambulance-drivers are some of the American boys who saw service with the French armies.  In this group of workers there are as many stories as there are nationalities.

If the workers have their stories, so have the five hundred little patients.  This barrack, converted into a hospital, is full of babies, the youngest being only six days old when I was there.  Many of the children have no parents.  Others have lost their mothers; their fathers are serving in the trenches.  It is not always easy to find out how they became orphans; there are such plentiful chances of losing parents who live continually under shell-fire.  One little boy on being asked where his mother was, replied gravely, “My Mama, she is dead.  Les Boches, they put a gun to ’er ’ead.  She is finished; I ’ave no Mama.”

The unchildlike stoicism of these children is appalling.  I spent two days among them and heard no crying.  Those who are sick, lie motionless as waxen images in their cots.  Those who are supposedly well, sit all day brooding and saying nothing.  When first they arrive, their faces are earth-coloured.  The first thing they have to be taught is how to be children.  They have to be coaxed and induced to play; even then they soon grow weary.  They seem to regard mere playing as frivolous and indecorous; and so it is in the light of the tragedies they have witnessed.  Children of seven have seen more of horror in three years than most old men have read about in a life-time.  Many of them have been captured by and recaptured from the Huns.  They have been in villages where the dead lay in piles and not even the women were spared.  They have been present while indecencies were worked upon their mothers.  They have seen men hanged, shot, bayoneted and flung to roast in burning houses.  The pictures of all these things hang in their eyes.  When they play, it is out of politeness to the kind Americans; not because they derive any pleasure from it.