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Show oo BELGIANS IN A DESPERATE WAY Destitute People Returning Starved and Many in Dying Dy-ing Condition. WASHINGTON, Nov. G. The desperate des-perate condition of the civilian population popu-lation of Belgium and northern France being repatriated and the work qf the Red Cross in restoring them to normal health Is graphically described in a report to Red Cross headquarters from Evian, the station where repatriates repatri-ates are received. These destitute people are returning to their land at the rate of 1,000 a week, 60 per cent of them children. Their hnrdshlps have been so acute that of the adults who return 30 per cent die tho first month of exhaustion. "There arrived last week," says the report, "a train loaded with Belgian children, 680 of them, shis, sickly, alone, all botween ages of 4 and 12, children of men who refused to work for the Germans and of mothers who let their children go rather than let them starve. They poured off the train, little ones clinging to the oldest ones, girls all crying, boys trying to cheer. Children Given Square Meal "They had come all tho long way alone. On the platform were the Red Cross workers to meet them, doctors and nurses with ambulances for the little sick ones, waiting outside the stations. The children poured out the station, marched along tho street shouting 'Meat, meat, we are going to have meat' to the casino where they were given a square meal, the first in many months. v "Again and again, while they ate, they broke out spontaneously Into songs in French against tho German songs which they had evidently learned in secret. Their little clawlike claw-like hands were significant of their undernourished bodies, but tho doctor said: 'We have them in Ume. A few weeks of proper feeding and they will pull up.' " - - |