The Cordova daily times., 1918-01-28
AND PEASANTS ARE
 SUFFERING
(By Associated Press)

OuS Just DaCk or the Rumdnian-GeT- man battle line. In a large number of cases the refugees are without shoes and without shelter of any kind. many of them being compelled to live in the fields and to endure the ex- posture of the prevailing cold winter nights Often their clothing consists only of few thin ragged cotton gar ments that give scarcely any warmth to their wasted bodies. Their situa- tion is rendered the more precarious by the fact that the districts in which they are living are subject to freouent artillery fire and to bombing by air planes.
 Those who are fortunate enough to have even the poor comfort of shelter in the shattered adobe houses that re- main standing are in almost every instance living under conditions of the most wretched misery. Forced sud denly by the exigencies of the military situation to abandon their former homes, they have found even seyeror hardships awaiting them in the deso- lated districts to which they have fled; for in these small villages there is neither anything to sustain life nor that medical care which often would save life. All doctors are needed on the front, and these unfortunate peo- pie, who might otherwise be useful factors to society if properly cared for, are left either to struggle alone with the rayages of famine and disease or to die of starvation.
 In some villages the refugees and peasants receive bread twice a week in others none at all It is true that a scant supply of corn meal is ob- tainable by application to eeRemment agencies, but this aseh ,Ie Zoe every meal is not oalcuia 0 give strength and sustenance tJ people al- ready reduced to the last extremity of destitution by the loss of f,their mater
 ial belongings and the financial sup port usually given them ly husbands or sons or brothers now serving their country. In two instances refugees were observed picking in the fields a kind of wild grass. which they eat, but which in America we would think only of feeding to cattle.
 The most pathetic case of suffering and want was witnessed in the little village of Soltiu, in the district of Putna. In a squalid shack of wood and were three little children m the point of exhaustion for lack of prope~ care and food. They were orpbans. The mother had lately died of typhus, which has blighted nearly the whole of Rumania; the father was serving at the front, and a little girl of 10 was acting as mother to two tiny tots of and '. The youngest child was lying helpless on bag on stone floor tragic spectacle of famine and disease
 A second case, which was only typi. cal of numberless others, was observed in dilapidated house no larger than the ordinary American bedroom There was no glass in the windows The roof was full of holes. Elsewhere in the house the open spaces were stuffed with rags. Here there were 10 persons crowded together undor conditions of squalor and misery, Raps and tattered patch-quilts formed the only coverings on the makeshift beds
 One of the inmates was an elderly woman who had recently lost her bus. band, but whose pride It was to hava three sons serving in the army. For this solemn contribution to The capse of her country, however. she had not even she small reward from her eov- ernment of decent existence. She had no food beyond few handfuls of cornmeal She was a spectre of fam. inc. Her face was drawn and pincbed and her countenance so inexpressiblv sad that it told It's own silent tale of the terrible hardships she and her