In the quotation which follows, Pierre Loti refers to the "little children" in Ypres. Until recently their presence there in what eventually became a deserted city was not explained, nor indeed specially noticed. But it has been discovered that when the last train left the interior of Belgium, supposedly for France, just in front of the advancing Germans, frantic mothers pushed their children into the already crowded cars, hoping that some one would care for them at their destination. This proved to be Ypres, where for months the motherless little ones wandered about the deserted streets, living in cellars and abandoned houses, the older ones caring for the younger, all living on what they could pick up in the streets. At last accounts they were being brought together by the French Government and cared for in a convent until the war is over, when every effort will be made to find their parents. Pierre Loti has written of Ypres as he saw it not long ago, and it gives us a vivid glimpse of the city in war times. "The squares around these tall ruins are filled with soldiers who stand still, or who move slowly about in silent little groups a trifle solemnly, as though awaiting something of which every one knows, but about which no one speaks. There are also poorly dressed women with haggard faces, and little children; but the lowly civil population is completely swallowed up in the mass of rough uniforms, almost all soiled and earthy, having evidently witnessed many a long battle. The graceful khaki yellow uniform of the English and the slender black regimentals of the Belgians mingle with the sky blue military cloaks of our French soldiers, who make up the majority. All this taken together results in an almost neutral shade, and two or three red cloaks of Arab chieftains form a sharp and unexpected contrast to this universal monotony of a gloomy winter evening. The thousands of soldiers glance instinctively at these ruins, as they take their melancholy evening strolls, but usually they remain at a distance, leaving both hall and church in their majestic isolation.... And now the night is almost here, the true night which will put an end to every trace of life. The crowd of soldiers retires gradually into the streets, already dark, but which surely will not be lighted. Far away a bugle is calling them to their evening meal, in the houses or the barracks where they sleep insecurely.... Now the silhouettes of the cathedral and the great belfry are all that are pictured against the sky--like the gesture of a shattered arm now turned into stone. As the night gradually closes in on you under the weight of its clouds, you recall with increasing vividness the mournful surroundings in the midst of which Ypres is now lost, the vast, tenantless plain, now almost black, the mutilated roads, over which none would know how to flee, the fields flooded with water or blanketed with snow, the lines of trenches, where, alas! our soldiers are cold and suffering."