nd in their eyes he
will read their thanks. But there is one soldier who cannot read their
thanks, who is spared the sight of their pity. He is the one who has
made all but the supreme sacrifice. He is the one who is blind. He sits
in perpetual darkness. You can remember certain nights that seemed to
stretch to doomsday, when sleep was withheld and you tossed and lashed
upon the pillow, praying for the dawn. Imagine a night of such torture
dragged out over many years, with the dreadful knowledge that the dawn
will never come. Imagine Paris with her bridges, palaces, parks, with
the Seine, the Tuileries, the boulevards, the glittering shop-windows
conveyed to you only through noise. Only through the shrieks of
motor-horns and the shuffling of feet.

The men who have been blinded in battle have lost more than sight. They
have been robbed of their independence. They feel they are a burden.
It is not only the physical loss they suffer, but the thought that no
longer are they of use, that they are a care, that in the scheme of
things--even in their own little circles of family and friends--there
is for them no place. It is not unfair to the _poilu_ to say that the
officer who is blinded suffers more than the private. As a rule, he
is more highly strung, more widely educated; he has seen more; his
experience of the world is broader; he has more to lose. Before the war
he may have been a lawyer, doctor, man of many affairs. For him it is
harder than, for example, the peasant to accept a future of unending
blackness spent in plaiting straw or weaving rag carpets. Under such
conditions life no longer tempts him. Instead, death tempts him, and the
pistol seems very near at hand.

[Illustration: All over France, on Christmas Day and the day after,
money was collected to send comforts and things good to eat to the
men at the front.]

It was to save men of the officer class from despair and from suicide,
to make them know that for them there still was a life of usefulness,
work, and accomplishment, that there was organized in France the
Committee for Men Blinded in Battle. The idea was to bring back to
officers who had lost their sight, courage, hope, and a sense of
independence, to give them work not merely mechanical but more in
keeping with their education and intelligence. The President of
France is patron of the society, and on its committees in Paris and New
York are many distinguished names. The French Government has pr