Mohave County miner., 1918-03-30
.A MOTHERS VOICE
 FROM THE TRENCHES

I had a long talk with an old wom- an, and her story made our blood run cold. She said that when the Ger mans entered the village, after bat tie with the French troops who were still near by, infuriated because of the resistance offered to their advance, ] they sought revenge on the women and children. Hundreds of men and young boys were lined up outside the church to be shot. Rapid-fire guns were used, and many fell only wound ed. These, with heaps of their dead comrades, were ordered buried by the Germans, although some of them were mercifully stabbed to death. One man, who was about to be thrown into the trenches by his own wife, who was commanded to bury him, raised his hand in pleading, but the German doc tor examined him and ordered him buried with the rest.
 Late one afternoon, as we were walking near the village of Carey, it began to rain heavily. There seem ed to be no habitation near, except small half-demolished hut, not much larger than two piano-cases. l ran toward it, and in my haste to shelter myself from the rain stumbled over an object crawling on the ground near the entrance to the shanty. It was an aged Belgian woman, clothed in rags. On questioning her l found she was trying to gather a few bits of wild green plants that grew on the spot. In her trembling and ghostly hands she held a piece of broken saucer with which she was attempting to catch some drinking water which she would use with the bits of green plant in making a little soup for her daughter, as she had nothing else to give her, and she was ill. We entered the hut and found that the sole inmates were this aged woman and her daughter. The latter had within the past weeks time, brought into the world her first child. She had received no medical assistance, had no bed, except little pile of dried grass, no clean linens, no friend but this aged mother, who was past eighty and herself an invalid. The girls husband, so the old woman told me, had been shot by the Ger mans, but she added with a bit of pride, q buried him myself, and he was wrapped in a nice clean sheet. I called the attention of the Red Cross workers to her case, and she was i'm mediately cared for and sent to hos pital.
 I talked with another old woman at Barcy, who had been through the battle of the Marne. She said that she had fled before the Germans and had managed to escape them; and that af- ter many privations had managed to return to her home to find it in abso- lute ruins. "But," she added, ''it was great joy to feel that I was near the spot where my children had play ed, and where the Germans could not thriveI"
 "You know" she said in French, "a mother is always mother, and when great sorrow has once come into a mothers life and she has lost her own children she immediately becomes the mother of all children who need her care, and so I am the mother of all wounded soldiers whom l find. You ought to see," she added with pride, "my boys whom I have nursed to health over there," and she pointed toward Paris as an aged prophet might have pointed toward Jerusalem.
 I asked her if she had any children of her own. q had four," she answer ed. "Two sons, who were killed in the battle of the Marne; and two young daughters, aged eight and twelve, who the Germans, after tying me, horribly treated in my presence. The last I saw of them was as they were being driven away in wagon. I pray to God that they are dead. Two of my neighbors' boys were nailed up- side down to a barn because they were found playing with a Belgian flag. They were aged only five and seven"
 It was not unusual to see young women who had escaped their tor mentors, hopelessly insane, wander ing over these desolate regions talk ing to themselves. At one place, quite near the front, we found six lit tie girls wandering around together with tiny paper bags which they chung to. Where they came from no one knew. Their names had been hastily worked in red thread on their little sleeves; and they had in the little bags their few small belongings. They all wept and clung to any woman who would notice them.
 I asked one woman whom l knew had given four sons to the war, each of whom had been killed at the battle of the Marne, how she felt about her part of the sacrifice. She looked at me with astonishment and horror In -. ---o- ,- eba ,-a,o1iad in French. e