be fully provided with all things necessary for continual streams of wounded men.  High society in France gave away its wealth with generous enthusiasm.  Whatever faults they might have they tried to wash them clean by charity, full-hearted and overflowing, for the wounded sons of France.  Great ladies who had been the beauties of the salons, whose gowns had been the envy of their circles, took off their silks and chiffons and put on the simple dress of the infirmiere and volunteered to do the humblest work, the dirty work of kitchen-wenches and scullery-girls and bedroom-maids, so that their hands might help, by any service, the men who had fought for France.  French doctors, keen and brilliant men who hold a surgeon’s knife with a fine and delicate skill, stood in readiness for the maimed victims of the war.  The best brains of French medical science were mobilized in these hospitals of Paris.

But the wounded did not come to Paris until the war had dragged on for weeks.  After the battle of the Marne, when the wounded were pouring into Orleans and other towns at the rate of seven thousand a day, when it was utterly impossible for the doctors there to deal with all that tide of agony, and when the condition of the French wounded was a scandal to the name of a civilized country, the hospitals of Paris remained empty, or with a few lightly wounded men in a desert of beds.  Because they could not speak French, perhaps, these rare arrivals were mostly Turcos and Senegalese, so that when they awakened in these wards and their eyes rolled round upon the white counterpanes, the exquisite flowers and the painted ceilings, and there beheld the beauty of women bending over their bedsides—­ women whose beauty was famous through Europe—­they murmured “Allahu akbar” in devout ecstasy and believed themselves in a Mohammedan paradise.

It was a comedy in which there was a frightful tragedy.  The doctors and surgeons standing by these empty beds, wandering through operating-theatres magnificently appointed, asked God why their hands were idle when so many soldiers of France were dying for lack of help, and why Paris, the nerve-centre of all railway lines, so close to the front, where the fields were heaped with the wreckage of the war, should be a world away from any work of rescue.  It was the same old strain of falsity which always runs through French official life.  “Politics!” said the doctors of Paris; “those cursed politics!”

But it was fear this time.  The Government was afraid of Paris, lest it should lose its nerve, and so all trains of wounded were diverted from the capital, wandering on long and devious journeys, side-tracked for hours, and if any ambulances came it was at night, when they glided through back streets under cover of darkness, afraid of being seen.