P. B. H. Starts Clothes Drive Monday--Seeks to Relieve Crying Need for Garments in Eastern Europe and Asia

On Monday the Phillips Brooks House Association will inaugurate its annual old clothes drive for the benefit of the Near East Relief. The list of the men who have been appointed as collectors will be announced in Monday's CRIMSON.

For a number of years the Phillips Brooks House has been holding similar drives to help clothe the people in Europe and the Near East, left destitute by the War. This year the clothes which will be collected will be used solely for the Near East Relief.

War Wreaked Havoc

As a result of the War, the people of the Near East were left in a condition of poverty which it is hard to realize in this country. Huge numbers of the inhabitants of Asia Minor, Syria, and the Caucasus were left homeless and without means of support or sustenance due to the destruction wreaked upon the country by the coming and going or armies and the devastation of guerilla warfare.

No Shield From Chill Syrian Winter

Recently conditions have if anything been aggravated. As an outcome of the Druse warfare which took place in Syria last year, during which parts of Damascus were bombed and laid in ruins, and villages in the Lebanon Mountains were destroyed, many of the orphans who had been placed with relatives by the efforts of the Near East Relief were made homeless. And now the city of Beirut is filled with refugees chiefly women and children, penniless and without any means of support or protection, who have only the rags they are wearing to shield them from the chill Syrian winter and the burning desert sun of summer.

All over Greece and the plains of Macedonian are dotted camps of these refugees still crowded with destitute widows and orphans for whom there is no work and consequently no clothing except that provided by charity.

Winter in the Caucasus is severe, almost Arctic. The snow covers the ground to a depth of ten feet or more while for the thermometer to register 25 degrees below zero is not the exception but the rule. Under these conditions the refugees of the Near East can live only if, through the charity of peoples more fortunate than they, they obtain clothing to protect them from the elements.

As a result of the deportation of Christian minorities from Anatolia, a million and a quarter of these refugees have been herded into Greece. Thousands more have come from the regions of Damascus and Hunns. Armenia has been trying to assimilate 30,000 refugees. It is in behalf of these people that the Phillips Brooks House Association will conduct its drive to obtain from students in the University, the cast-off clothes which they will no longer use, but which will be most helpful to the refugees of the Near East.