ed by
premature senility, but no country so far has shown itself as wholly
crumbling in an age where the world is still young.

V

A few days later I went with Madame Balli and Mr. Holman-Black to the
military hospital, Chaptal, devoted to the men whose faces had been
mutilated. The first room was an immense apartment with an open space
beyond the beds filled to-day with men who crowded about Madame Balli,
as much to get that personal word and smile from her, which the French
soldier so pathetically places above all gifts, as to have the first
choice of a pipe or knife.

After I had distributed the usual little presents of cigarettes,
chocolate, soap, and post-cards among the few still in bed, I sat on
the outside of Madame Balli's mob and talked to one of the
infirmieres. She was a Frenchwoman married to an Irishman who was
serving in the British navy, and her sons were in the trenches. She
made a remark to me that I was destined to hear very often:

"Oh, yes, we work hard, and we are only too glad to do what we can for
France; but, my God! what would become of us if we remained idle and
let our minds dwell upon our men at the Front? We should go mad. As it
is, we are so tired at night that we sleep, and the moment we awaken
we are on duty again. I can assure you the harder we have to work the
more grateful we are."

She looked very young and pretty in her infirmiere uniform of white
linen with a veil of the same stiff material and the red cross on her
breast, and it was odd to hear that sons of hers were in the trenches.

After that nearly all the men in the different wards we visited were
in bed, and each room was worse than the last, until it was almost a
relief to come to the one where the men had just been operated on and
were so bandaged that any features they may have had left were
indistinguishable.

For the uncovered faces were horrible. I was ill all night, not only
from the memory of the sickening sights with which I had remained
several hours in a certain intimacy--for I went to assist Madame Balli
and took the little gifts to every bedside--but from rage against the
devilish powers that unloosed this horror upon the world. One of the
grim ironies of this war is that the Hohenzollerns and the junkers are
so constituted mentally that they never will be haunted with awful
visions like those that visited the more plastic conscience of Charles
IX after St. Bartholomew; but at least it will be some