she has disappeared, taken he does not know where. An old peasant woman of sixty-three is taken away from her husband near Villers-aux-Vents (Meuse) by a company of Germans. A child of sixteen is seized at its mother's house at Mulhouse.
Such action shows an utter lack of human feeling, and is almost more absurd than cruel. It really appears as though people had been deliberately separated from all who were dearest to them; and of those who have so disappeared no trace remains by which they can at present be found. I am not speaking of Belgium; there the silence is as of the grave. Of what is taking place there nothing has been heard in the outer world for three months. Are the villages and towns still in existence? I have before me letters from parents (in some cases belonging to neutral nations) begging for news of their children of twelve or eight years of age, detained in Belgium since hostilities broke out. I have even found in the lists of these vanished children—doubtless prisoners of war—youthful citizens of four and two years of age. Are we to understand that they too could have been mobilised?
We see the anguish of the survivors. Imagine
