A soldier’s wife who had spent the greater part of £100 Army money in drink was sent to prison for neglecting her children. Almost everything in the house was pawned, including the children’s clothes; and the woman began to drink at five o’clock in the morning, and went on drinking all day. _Facts in “Cork Constitution,” December 10, 1915_ A soldier’s wife in Monmouthshire, with £3 9_s._ a week, was found sodden with drink, while the soldier’s eight children were in rags starving by day and huddling up in one bed by night. _Facts in “Westminster Gazette,” July 22, 1916_ A smart tidy woman in a London suburb, whose husband is fighting in Mesopotamia, has £2 10_s._ 6_d._ a week. She used to love her children and had a happy home, but she drinks away her Army pay, lives with a married man who has six children, and has become a drunken slattern. The other wife is beaten and neglected, and the soldier’s children have gone to the workhouse. _Records of Shaftesbury Society_ The four children of a soldier in Dublin were found hungry and shivering with cold while the mother was drinking. Several times she had let her baby fall while reeling with it in the street. _Facts in “Dublin Evening Herald,” October 20, 1916_ At the trial of a soldier’s wife for drinking and neglecting seven children, it was stated that a child of eleven was left in charge of a baby a fortnight old while the mother was drinking. At night all the children were heard screaming. The house was in utter darkness, and there was an escape of gas. Some men went in and turned off the gas, and at last the mother came stumbling out of a publichouse across the road. _Facts in “Sheffield Star,” November 25, 1915_ “Your husband is fighting for his country, and his children have the right to be protected,” said the Chairman of the Chesterfield Bench to a soldier’s wife. Her children were found starving while she was drinking, and one day the little boy of three was found crouching naked inside the fender, trying to get warm. The police described the house as foul from top to bottom, with a heap of horrible rags for a bed, and a food cupboard that made the house unendurable when the door was opened. _Facts in “Yorkshire Telegraph,” March 24, 1916_ The wife of a missing soldier was sent to prison at Chesterfield for neglecting three children between 13 years and 16 weeks old. She had gone astray through drink, and the youngest child, born under terrible conditions, was not her husband’s. It was found lying on a filthy bed, and its drunken mother, to satisfy its pangs of hunger, had given it pennyworths of laudanum. Eleven people slept in two foul bedrooms. _Chesterfield Police Records, October 9, 1916_