War Impressions
Florence Kiper Frank
The Moving-Picture Show
We sat at a moving-picture show. Over a little bridge streamed the Belgian refugees, women, children, boys, dogs, horses, carts, household goods—an incongruous procession. The faces were stolid, the feet plodded on—plodded on!
“See!” said my friend, “sometimes a woman turns to look at a bursting shell.”
I murmured, “How interesting!”
And my soul shuddered. It shuddered at sophistication.
The man who had taken the pictures told us about them. He had been not more than three weeks ago in Belgium....
“Huzza!” sang my ancestor of five thousand years back. He led a band of marauders into an enemy’s village. They ripped things up and tore about the place singing and looting. There was nothing much left to that village by the time they got through with it.
But the people many miles away did not behold his exploits. Alas, there were no moving-picture shows in those days!