In the winter of 1916, the children of Reims, France, went to school under conditions that seem almost impossible to imagine.
German shells were falling over the city, cannon fire interrupted lessons, and the threat of poison gas hung over every classroom. Yet school continued.
Each child arrived wearing a gas mask and carrying a respirator, prepared for the possibility that a deadly gas shell might burst nearby at any moment.
After children were killed by shell fragments and others died from poisonous fumes, city officials ordered students to wear protective masks during school hours.
What followed was one of the strangest and most heartbreaking scenes of World War I: little boys and girls trying to learn their lessons while dressed for survival in a city under siege.
Reims Tots Wear Gas Masks — Fear Asphyxiation
REIMS, France. — School goes on in Reims, while German shells break over the city and the boom of cannon punctuates the lessons in the class rooms.
But it is the strangest school that France, or probably any other nation, has ever seen.
Each little boy and girl goes to school wearing a mask and carrying a respirator — for nobody knows when one of the German’s poisonous gas bombs, which have been thrown into the city at intervals, is going to burst in or about the schoolhouse.
Several children have been killed by pieces of shell in the bombardments of the city, and a few perished in fumes of poisonous gases. Then the regulation was issued that all should wear gas masks to prevent a recurrence of these fatalities.
Source: The Day Book. Chicago, Ill. February 21, 1916.
