Lest We Forget: World War Stories

by John G. Thompson; Inez Bigwood

AT SCHOOL NEAR THE LINES[ToC]

The boys and girls in America have listened with great interest and sympathy to the many stories of children in devastated France, left fatherless, homeless, perhaps motherless, with no games or sport, indeed with no desire to play games or sports of any kind. For them, there seemed to be only the awful roar and thunder of the cannon, which might at any moment send down a bursting shell upon their heads. The clothes they wore and the food they ate were theirs only as they were given to them, and so often given by strangers.

In America the school children worked, earned, saved, and sent their gifts to those thousands of destitute children, and with their gifts sent letters of love and interest to their little French cousins across the seas.

Many of the letters were written in quiet, sunny schoolrooms, thousands of miles from the noise of battle. But many a letter thus written reached the hands of a child who sat huddled beside his teacher in a damp, dark cellar that took the place of the pleasant little schoolhouse he had known.

But in those cellars and hidden places, the children studied and learned as best they might, in order some day to be strong, bright men and women for their beloved France, when the days of battle should be over and victory should have been won for them to keep.

The gladness of the children when they received the letters will probably never be fully known. Perhaps it seemed to some of them like that morning on which they marched away from the school building for the last time. The shells had begun to burst near them, as they sat in the morning session. Quickly they put aside their work, and listened quietly while the master timed the interval between the bursting of the shells. At his order, they had formed in line for marching, and at the moment the third or fourth shell fell, they marched out of the school away into a cellar seventy paces off. There, sheltered by the strong, stout walls, they listened to the next shell bursting as it fell straight down into the schoolhouse, where by a few moments' delay, they would all have perished or been severely injured.

So, while they heard the cannon roaring, they were happy to know that their friends in America thought of them and were helping them. No one will ever realize just how much it meant to the French people to know that America was their friend, or the great joy they felt when the American soldiers marched in to take their places in the fight for France and the freedom of the world.

Odette Gastinel, a thirteen-year-old girl of the Lycée Victor Duruy, one of the schoolrooms near the front, has written of the coming of the Americans. Throughout the United States her little essay has been read, and great men and women have marveled at its beauty of thought and wording, and have called it a little masterpiece.

In the first paragraph, she tells of the great distance between the millions of men (the Germans and the Allies) although separated only by a narrow stream; and in the second, she speaks of the closeness of sympathy between France and America,—though America lies three thousand miles over the sea.