414 
THE AMERIC AN-SC ANDINA VI AN RE JIEJV 
By a kindly fate, I was between the two processions when they 
approached each other, coming from the train and the ship. I asked 
two tired little teachers at the head of the first procession who their chil¬ 
dren were and where they were going. The teachers answeied, in 
German, that the children had come from Austria and Germany and 
were going to Sweden for a holiday. I assumed that it w as a JMtiA - 
Gay excursion just across the gulf and back. 
Then I turned to the others. Their leaders wore Red Cross bras¬ 
sards. But who were the children? And where were they going? 
They, too, I was told, were German and Austrian children, chiefly Aus¬ 
trian. and they were returning from a “holiday” in Sweden. But what 
a o'enerous “holiday” it bad been*, for it was not a day or a week-end 
o • 
Where the Two Processions Met at Ha gen 
holiday, but a holiday of a year and a half, up in the land of milk and 
white bread and butter, where they had been cared for in Swedish 
homes, under the auspices of the Swedish Red Cross. There were 88T 
of them in this returning group, and each of them was carrying a pack¬ 
age of fifty kilos, including warm cloths and food of the sort they would 
not find at home. “Do you see that girl with a green ribbon in her 
hat ?” said one of the Swedish Red Cross ladies who had come down with 
them; “she lias gained twenty kilos.” (That is about forty pounds.) 
And the thin, hungry, tired children in the other procession of a 
thousand were going up to take their places in this hospitable land, 
which has no scars of war upon it, which has no “time of great hate ’ to 
remember, and which has chosen this beautiful and practical interna¬ 
tional way of showing mercy to thousands. 
