$Unique_ID{how04715}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{True Stories Of The Great War
III - A Belgian Mother And Her Babe}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Treller, Willie}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{
}
$Date{1914}
$Log{}
Title:       True Stories Of The Great War
Book:        German Students Tell What Sherman Meant
Author:      Treller, Willie
Date:        1914
Translation: Freedman, Julian Bindley

III - A Belgian Mother And Her Babe

     Ingelmunster, November, 1914.

     In Fosses, near Namur, I happened to be the only physician in the
place, as all the doctors had fled.  So it came about that the first
prescriptions that I have ever written were in the French language.  It
was rather odd, but it went.  The sixty-five-year-old apothecary and I
have opened many good bottles of Burgundy in his bachelor apartment while
he told of his student days in Geneva and Brussels; I of Germany and its
glories.

     One time I was called to a village an hour distant to the help of a
young mother.  And it may have presented a curious and unforgettable
spectacle to the Belgian peasants when after two hours' hard work the
"jeun docteur Allemand," shirt-sleeved, armed and girt with a woman's
apron, presented the young mother with a tiny, howling Belgian, while
outside the guns thundered in the distance, killing perhaps hundreds and
hundreds of other Belgians.

     Willy Treller.

     (Translations by Julian Bindley Freedman for the New York Tribune.)