100 years ago: Grim report from Red Cross hospitals in France

Miss Molly Thompson, a Red Cross nurse in France, said it was absolutely true that the Germans were bombing hospitals.

She said her hospital was bombed “more or less every night” for three weeks.

“We have had a bad time, and many was the minute when I thought my life wasn’t worth much,” she wrote to her brother in Spokane. “… On Sunday night they started at 10:30 and dropped 250 bombs on hospitals only. They just hurled bombs down on us like hail, and the size can be judged from the fact that one of them that landed in the grass patch at our entrance made a hole 20 feet wide. … Every night, we had to drag our wounded patients out into trenches and those that could not be moved were taken into the woods and walled up with sandbags to save them from shrapnel.”

Miss Thompson barely escaped serious injury when a star-shell (like a flare) landed right beside her. Two Australian soldiers knew what that meant. They immediately grabbed her, pushed her in the bottom of the trench and sat on her. A bomb arrived seconds later, and buried them in mud. They were all dug out, alive.

From the parenting beat: Two Spokane parents were charged with second-degree assault for confining their three children in a rabbit pen for more than a day and beating them with sticks.

The children were released after neighbors notified authorities.

The parents admitted that they had disciplined the children, but with the “best of intentions.” The children had run away from home and the mother said she was teaching them to stay at home.