The father of the family was in bed unconscious, with typhoid
fever. The mother, dead from the disease, had been buried the day
before.
During the funeral the eldest daughter, a pretty girl of sixteen, sat
up in a chair trying to look after the visitors. When we called she
also was in bed delirious with the disease in the same room as her
father.
The baby in the carriage had had typhoid. A little two year old boy
was just recovering, and was thought to have been the original case.
Two other boys of seven and nine years of age were getting some bread
and milk for their dinner, one of them being probably a mild case; and
a girl of eleven, evidently coming down with the disease, was going
about looking after the household.
With that swarm of disease-carrying flies in the house there was no
possibility of any of the children escaping the infection. It was with
the greatest difficulty that the sanitary officer of the division
succeeded in getting the French civilian authorities to move in the
matter and remove the cases to the French civilian hospital. The
father died a week later, and the sanitary officer himself was
subsequently killed during the battle of the Somme.
The French refugees do not complain; they are not that kind. They
told their stories simply and invariably finished with a shrug of the
shoulders and the phrase "c'est la guerre n'est ce pas?" (That is war,
is it not?) But if the French army ever gets on German soil I would
hate to be a German.
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