Foreign News: Wild Children

Seldom does Mr. Walter Duranty, able Moscow correspondent of the New York Times, indulge himself in any but the most decorous nouns and adjectives. Last week a suppressed flair for a style more incarnadine and virile apparently overcame him. He filed a long despatch, which ran in part as follows:

“Under the iron rule of the proletarian dictatorship freedom still exists in Russia. Right here in Moscow, despite Red guards and secret police, freedom runs rampant, wild as wolves and as savage—a freedom anarchistic—free to rob, free to fight, free to kill, free (as needs often must) to starve.

“It is the freedom of Moscow’s homeless children, thousands of them, parentless, homeless. . . . highwaymen, murderers and dope fiends almost before their bones have hardened. They have gnome-like, filthy faces, childish eyes, shaggy hair, long men’s coats, trousers pinned up or cut and ragged. They shuffle together, taking counsel, then swift as swallows make one after another a leap at some shopman’s counter, grabbing anything, running like the wind.

“I followed several of them as they fled along a street. In a courtyard they were dividing their booty. One had bread, one a herring, one a packet of cigarets, one chocolate, one nothing. But all was put in the centre and divided equally. Then they began eating hungrily.

“I asked them where they lived. They eyed me like small animals waiting to spring but not daring. . . . A small blue-eyed girl wearing a fragment of an army overcoat over a jute sack cut short above her thin bare legs, said amiably:

We know where we live, but if you tell the gendarmes about us we will find you and cut your heart out.’

“So I withdrew, discomfited.”