n one of the purlieus of Paris
where the Lycee of Arts and Crafts has been turned into a hospital for
convalescents.

Under the direction of a doctor each convalescent was working at what
his affected muscles most needed or could stand. Those that ran
sewing-machines exercised their legs. Those that made toys and cut
wood with the electric machines got a certain amount of arm exercise.
The sewing-machine experts had already made fifty thousand sacks for
sand fortifications and breastworks.

From this enormous Lycee (which cost, I was told, five million francs)
we drove to the Salpetriere, which in the remote ages before the war,
was an old people's home. Its extent, comprising, as it does, court
after court, gardens, masses of buildings which loom beyond and yet
beyond, not only inspired awed reflections of the number of old that
must need charity in Paris but made one wonder where they were at the
present moment, now that the Salpetriere had been turned into a
hospital. Perhaps, being very old, they had conveniently died.

Here the men made wooden shoes with leather tops for the trenches,
cigarette packages, ingenious toys--the airships and motor ambulances
were the most striking; baskets, chairs, lace.

The rooms I visited were in charge of an English infirmiere and were
fairly well aired. Some of the men would soon be well enough to go
back to the Front and were merely given occupation during their
convalescence. But in the main the object is to prepare the
unfortunates known as reformes for the future.

Since the fighting on the Somme began Madame Lyon has gone several
times a month to the recaptured towns, in charge of train-loads of
installations for the looted homes of the wretched people. In one
entire village the Germans had left just one saucepan. Nothing else
whatever.

XIII

BRIEF ACCOUNTS OF GREAT WORK

THE DUCHESSE D'UZES

The Duchesse d'Uzes (_jeune_) was not only one of the reigning
beauties of Paris before the war but one of its best-dressed women;
nor had she ever been avoided for too serious tendencies. She went to
work the day war began and she has never ceased to work since. She has
started something like seventeen hospitals both at the French front
and in Saloniki, and her tireless brain has to its credit several
notable inventions for moving field hospitals.

Near Amiens is the most beautiful of the duc's castles, Lucheux, built
in the eleventh century. This she turned into a