American President of Le Bien-Etre du
Blesse is to provide the major part of the funds with which it is run,
lest any of my readers should be tempted to help me out.[E] Donations
from ten cents to ten thousand are welcome, and $5 keeps a wounded man
for his entire time in one of those dreary hospitals in that
devastated region known as "Le Zone des Armees," where relatives nor
friends ever come to visit, and there is practically no sound but the
thunder of guns without and groans within. Not that the French do
groan much. I went through many of these hospitals and never heard a
demonstration. But I am told they do sometimes.

[E] All donations in money are sent to the bankers, Messers John
Munroe & Co., _Eighth Floor_, 360 Madison Avenue, New York.

To Madame d'Andigne belongs all the credit of building up Le Bien-Etre
du Blesse from almost nothing (for we were nearly two years behind the
other great war-relief organizations in starting). Although many give
her temporary assistance no one will take charge of any one department
and she runs every side and phase of the work. Last winter she was
cold, and hungry, and always anxious about her husband, but she was
never absent from the office for a day except when she could not get
coal to warm it; and then she conducted the business of the oeuvre in
her own apartment, where one room was warmed with wood she had sawed
herself.

To-day Le Bien-Etre du Blesse is not only one of the most famous of
all the war-relief organizations of the fighting powers but it has
been run with such systematic and increasing success that the War
Office has installed Bien-Etre kitchens in the hospitals (before, the
nurses had to cook our donations over their own spirit lamp) and
delegated special cooks to relieve the hard-worked infirmieres of a
very considerable tax on their energies. This is a tremendous bit of
radicalism on the part of the Military Department of France, and one
that hardly can be appreciated by citizens of a land always in a state
of flux. There is even talk of making these Bien-Etre kitchens a part
of the regular military system after the war is over, and if they do
commit themselves to so revolutionary an act no doubt the name of the
young American Marquise will go down to posterity--as it deserves to
do, in any case.

XII

MADAME CAMILLE LYON

Madame Lyon committed on my behalf what for her was a tremendous
breach of the proprieties: she called upon