“I wrote to the chief doctor at Besancon.  No response.  I sent him a telegram with the reply prepaid.  No response.  I wrote him a third letter, this time a trifle sarcastic.  I received finally a despatch:  ‘Regnier is not known at this hospital.’

“I still had the telegram in my hand when to my house came the sister of the dead soldier, in mourning, and beaming, and gave me a letter.  ’It is my brother who has written us.’  So there was no mistake.  The dead man wrote on the 2d October.

“‘Very well,’ said I to the family.  ’Are you sufficiently reassured now?’

“Some days after I received from the Red Cross hospital at Besancon a letter giving me news of Regnier and explaining that there were several hospitals in the town, that they had only just received my letter, etc., etc.

“I did not think more of the matter until October 23, when I received a circular from the prefecture of Isere, asking me to advise the Regnier family that the soldier Regnier, wounded, was being treated at the hospital of Besancon.

“At last I thought the affair was closed, when, to-day, October 30, I received the enclosed despatch, sent by I know not whom, informing me that the soldier Regnier is unknown in the hospital of Besancon!

“Oh, my head, my head!”

You can imagine what this slashing old privateer would do with a letter like this.  The censor will not permit him to make any comment.  Very well—­he wishes to make none.  “You see, Mr. Viviani, it isn’t one of those execrable parliamentarians who makes these complaints.  It is a mayor, a humble mayor, officially designated by you to transmit to his people the striking results of your ‘organization,’ of your ‘administration,’ of your ‘intensification’ in the cruelly delicate matter of giving news to families.  He supplies the picture, and you see in plain daylight your ‘intensification’ at work.  What do you think of it?  What can you say about it?  Do you believe that because you have given to your censor the right—­pardon me, the power—­to make white spaces in the columns of newspapers that that is going to suppress the fact?  Do you believe,” etc., etc.

In the same editorial was a letter from a father whose two sons, on the firing-line, had received none of the family letters since the beginning of the war and wrote pathetically asking if their parents and little sister were ill, or how they had offended.  A wife enclosed a letter from her husband, telling how he was suffering from the cold because of insufficient clothing; a doctor wrote protesting because there was not a single bottle of antitetanic serum in his field-hospital.

We found M. Clemenceau in his lodgings late one afternoon—­a leonine old gentleman bundled up in cap and overcoat before a little grate fire, while a secretary ran through the big heap of letters piled on the bed.  In the corner of the room was a roll-top desk—­the sanctum, evidently, of The Chained Man.