compensation to
picture them rending the air with lamentations over their own downfall
and hurling curses at their childish folly.

It is the bursting of shrapnel that causes the face mutilations,
and although the first room we visited at Chaptal was a witness
to the marvelous restorative work the surgeons are able to
accomplish--sometimes--many weeks and even months must elapse while
the face is not only red and swollen, but twisted, the mouth almost
parallel with the nose--and often there is no nose--a whole cheek
missing, an eye gone, or both; sometimes the whole mouth and chin have
been blown away; and I saw one face that had nothing on its flat
surface but a pipe inserted where the nose had been. Another was so
terrible that I did not dare to take a second look, and I have only a
vague and mercifully fading impression of a hideousness never before
seen in this world.

On the other hand I saw a man propped up in bed, with one entire side
of his face bandaged, his mouth twisted almost into his right ear, and
a mere remnant of nose, reading a newspaper with his remaining eye and
apparently quite happy.

The infirmiere told me that sometimes the poor fellows would cry--they
are almost all very young--and lament that no girl would have them
now; but she always consoled them by the assurance that men would be
so scarce after the war that girls would take anything they could get.

In one of the wards a young soldier was sitting on the edge of his
cot, receiving his family, two women of middle age and a girl of about
seventeen. His face was bandaged down to the bridge of his nose, but
the lower part was uninjured. He may or may not have been permanently
blind. The two older women--his mother and aunt, no doubt--looked
stolid, as women of that class always do, but the girl sat staring
straight before her with an expression of bitter resentment I shall
never forget. She looked as if she were giving up every youthful
illusion, and realized that Life is the enemy of man, and more
particularly of woman. Possibly her own lover was in the trenches. Or
perhaps this mutilated boy beside her was the first lover of her
youth. One feels far too impersonal for curiosity in these hospitals
and it did not occur to me to ask.

Madame Balli had also brought several boxes of delicacies for the
private kitchen of the infirmieres, where fine dishes may be concocted
for appetites still too weak to be tempted by ordinary hospital fare:
s