re
--if it can be mended. Here, when a battle-field is cleared, every article
that can possibly be used again is brought; and the manager pointed with
pride to the furnaces in his power-house, which formerly burned coal and
now are fed with refuse--broken wheels of gun-carriages, sawdust, and
even old shoes. Hundreds of French girls and even German prisoners are
resoling and patching shoes with the aid of American machinery, and even
the uppers of such as are otherwise hopeless are cut in spirals into
laces. Tunics, breeches, and overcoats are mended by tailors; rusty camp
cookers are retinned, and in the foundries the precious scraps of cast
iron are melted into braziers to keep Tommy in the trenches warm. In the
machine-shops the injured guns and cannon are repaired. German prisoners
are working there, too. At a distance, in their homely grey tunics, with
their bullet-shaped heads close-cropped and the hairs standing out like
the needles of a cylinder of a music-box, they had the appearance of hard
citizens who had become rather sullen convicts. Some wore spectacles. A
closer view revealed that most of them were contented, and some actually
cheerful. None, indeed, seemed more cheerful than a recently captured
group I saw later, who were actually building the barbed-wire fence that
was to confine them.

My last visit in this town was to the tiny but on a "corner lot," in
which the Duchess of Sutherland has lived now for some years. As we had
tea she told me she was going on a fortnight's leave to England; and no
Tommy in the trenches could have been more excited over the prospect.
Her own hospital, which occupies the rest of the lot, is one of those
marvels which individual initiative and a strong social sense such as
hers has produced in this war. Special enterprise was required to save
such desperate cases as are made a specialty of here, and all that
medical and surgical science can do has been concentrated, with
extraordinary success, on the shattered men who are brought to her wards.
That most of the horrible fractures I saw are healed, and healed quickly
--thanks largely to the drainage system of our own Doctor Carrel--is not
the least of the wonders of the remarkable times in which we live.

The next day, Sunday, I left for Paris, bidding farewell regretfully to
the last of my British-officer hosts. He seemed like an old, old friend
--though I had known him but a few days. I can see him now as he wa