The Bridgeport times and evening farmer., 1919-05-26

ending with a glorified bird-house; this was German observation post.
 In the small towns and villages which have been shelled, but not totally destroyed, there is something horribly incongruous between neat brick houses in rows, which as one sees in any suburb of London, ana the fact that furious hand-to-hand fighting went off around them, and that machine guns were fired from their windows.
 In Mons you are shown a street through which the sacrificed corps marched in August, 1914, and through which, four and a quarter years later, the triumphant Canadians tramped in the wake of the flying enemy. And the same people are liv- ing in the houses who saw both You are conscious of an unreasonably wonder that they should be able to live and eat and sleep and even laugh as do others, who have been so much part of the greatest calamity in his tory.
 Tragedy of The Children.
 The tragedy of the children throu ghout the war-zone touches one deeply.
 I listened to the story of a man who had passed many times through a certain village where the children played while the shells roared, and at last all in a little group, making toy houses with bits of brick, were killed before their eyes.
 The pathetic part was," he said. that the war-zone children were not frightened in most cases. for these younger ones could not remember any other existence. War and all it's ,;, thunder storms"
 Domestic life goes on in the houses that have been only half destroyed. Part of the building has a torn roof, riddled with holes. and rooms that are crumbling to pieces. while the rest is still at home. In place that looks like a ruin you may see light in the window, and a woman within is preparing a meal, or a child runs out from some forlorn place, sand bagged about the lower part as if it had sheltered troops, and looks. up and down the road eXpectantly.
 The difference between invaded France. and Belgium and the British Isles stands out very clearly when one drives through miles and miles of places which were once part of a happy, provincial county, rather aloof from international politics. but busy with their affairs, and their domestic life, and are now places of the dead.
 No description can do justice to the sight. Towns and villages, their shops, villas, cottages, and churches, silent heaps of dust and morton and bricks; sandbags. rusty wire, torn railways, and broken bridges make the country a great refuse heap. Oc- casionally the desolation is empha- sized By a few figures as women l search for some reminder of their old homes.
 Can you wonder that France thinks bitterly of a neat, clean Germany, un- touched by the invader?
 Homeless and Broken. As I motored through the devas- i tated and half destroyed areas ot l France, where not a factory chimney ! smokes-a fact which may have es- | capped the notice of President Will | son-I thought how small was the i destruction of cottages and houses ! in comparison with the whole war | but how great to the individual tc | whom this corn was the world. It i: | no wonder that the refugees, home | less and broken and poor, turn in | stinctively to the one spot on eartt | which they love.
 i It is said that women set a higf l value on human life because they | know what it costs to produce it l and that men value property as the