From the archive: Paying the price
Janet Scott continues her series looking at how events during the first world war were covered in the pages of the Friend. As the summer of 1916 approached, fighting on the Western Front intensified.
The Friend carried an evocative report in the issue of 7 April 1916 that conveyed some of the effects of the battle of Verdun, which had brought a stream of refugees from the bombarded village through Bar-le-Duc. A Friend who had witnessed the event, S Margery Fry, wrote the report:
Nothing we have yet seen has given us quite so piteous a sense of the misery of the civil population in war time as these crowds of tired, patient, mud-drenched people (a large proportion of them old and infirm) who have had to leave their homes at an hour or two hours notice, bringing with them in many cases nothing but the three packets allowed by the military authorities on the camions which convey them. The citizens of Bar have done wonders. In a town already crammed with refugees and with troops, where both food and lodging are incredibly difficult to get, they found space in the upper storey of the covered market, provided cauldrons which hardly ever failed night or day to supply hot food to the hundreds who pour through, and arranged for a certain number of palliasses and blankets.
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