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Show TOTS PLAY WHERE DEATH J5J1PANT Children in French War Zone Promise to Become Psychological Riddle. STRANGERS TO PEACE Mothers Warn .Youngsters to Come in Out of Downpour Down-pour of Shells. WITH THE BRITISH ARMIES IN FRANCE, Jan. 27. To those who have lived among them, the children of the war zone in France will ever remain l psychological riddle. It is startling to the nowcomer at the war to find them here at all. It is positively uncanny to see them a't play where a shell might break almost any moment, utterly oblivious ob-livious to the soldiors and scenes about them, and with senses so attuned to the ordinary nerve-racking noises that only a prolonged lull in the ceaseless roar of guns would cause them the least concern. con-cern. They cling with their elders to the remnants of their shell-shattered homes in tho bombarded towns and villages, where even ret the German guns send thoir shells. Some have been born within with-in sound of the cannon and others have come into their first sense of being in tho midst of battle. The strange phenomenon phe-nomenon of life to them will be the unwonted un-wonted stillness of peace. A striking picture it is to see a little French girl, 5 or 6 years old, with a plaited "pig tail" down her back, tripping trip-ping bareheaded along a road where even Boldler men venture only under the protection pro-tection of their big steel hats, feuc.h a little girl sat and softly sang and knitted in front of her home near an old Flemish mill one bright and warm December noon while a score of aeroplanes aero-planes whirled and fought overhead and the high blue sky was filled with the fleecy cotton balls that come from bursting burst-ing shrapnel shells. She could see the seared and scarred lines on the distant hills which were the enemy guns, and, still further back, the occasional white-hot white-hot flashes of enemy guns. School Is Under Ground. No stranger Behool can be found In all the world than that at Arras. Arras itself is a strange and ghostly city. Some of the houses are just as their owners left them during the first bombardment bombard-ment in October two years ago. Others have been pulverized along with the cathedral, ca-thedral, the city hall ana the railway station three favorite targets of the German gunners. The enemy lines skirt the eastern edge of the city, and daily from these messengers of death are sent shrieking into Arras bursting in fury from the sky. In the midst of all this malignity of wax some two score children or more go to school.: Their classroom is in the cellar of a house so well demolished that a few additional shells would scarcely change the character of the mass of debris that serves as a protective protec-tive roof. It would take a terrific bombardment bom-bardment to interrupt them at their lessons. les-sons. The muffled sounds of shells crashing in the distance has become far too commonplace to attract attention. All Arras lives underground. There are qniet periods of the day when the women, children and old men venture abroad for a friendlv call at a neighboring neigh-boring cellar or for the sake of a stroll an-d a breath of fresh air. Opportunity after opportunity has been given them to leave, but they prefer to remain with what is, or was, their very own. Three persons were killed just outside the school one day, but the children in the cellar knew nothing of the tragedy. When school is out each afternoon the children are told to hurry home as fast as they can go, and there is a great pattering of little wooden-soled shoes down the melancholy streets. Loved by Tommies. There are scores of other towns within the fire zone, but not quite so close to the war as Arras, whore children live by hundreds. It is no infrequent thing to hear mothers calling their children in from a desultory bombardment just as they would from a shower of rain. Sereral months ago enemy aeroplanes dropped bombs in a village six or seven miles behind the ,firing line. It was Sunday afternoon, and the streets were thronged. Outside a soldier's moving picture theater a line of children were waiting for the doors to open. One of the bombs fell near where they stood. They scattered like so many mice, but within a minute of two all were scrambling scram-bling ba-ck to their places in the queue as if nothing at all had happened. English Tommies love children, and when Dilleted in a village can alwavs be sen playing with the tots, buying them all sorts of candies and sweetmeats, and even wheeling them gaily along in perambulators per-ambulators while fond mothers look on. |