It was not a pretty sight, and the only thing that redeemed its ugliness was the way in which all those medical men were devoting themselves to the almost hopeless task of untwisting the contorted limbs of those victims of the war spirit, and restoring the shape of man botched by the artists of the death machines.

In the Great Hall through which in the days of peace pretty women used to wander with raised eyebrows and little cries of “Ciel!” (even French women revolted against the most advanced among the Futurists), there was a number of extraordinary contrivances of a mechanical kind which shocked one’s imagination, and they were being used by French soldiers in various uniforms and of various grades, with twisted limbs, and paralytic gestures.  One young man, who might have been a cavalry officer, was riding a queer bicycle which never moved off its pedestal, though its wheels revolved to the efforts of its rider.  He pedalled earnestly and industriously, though obviously his legs had stiffened muscles, so that every movement gave him pain.  Another man, “bearded like the bard,” sat with his back to the wall clutching at two rings suspended from a machine and connected with two weights.  Monotonously and with utterly expressionless eyes, he raised and lowered his arms a few inches or so, in order to bring back their vitality, which had been destroyed by a nervous shock.  Many wheels were turning in that great room and men were strapped to them, as though in some torture chamber, devilishly contrived.  In this place, however, the work was to defeat the cruelties of War the Torturer, after it had done its worst with human flesh.

The worst was in other rooms, where poor wrecks of men lay face downwards in hot-air boxes, where they stayed immovable and silent as though in their coffins, or with half their bodies submerged in electrolysed baths.  Nurses were massaging limbs which had been maimed and smashed by shell-fire, and working with fine and delicate patience at the rigid fingers of soldiers, some of whom had lost their other arms, so that unless they could use their last remaining fingers, three or four to a hand, they would be useless for any work in the world.  But most pitiable of all were the long rows of the paralysed and the blind, who lay in the hospital ward, motionless and sightless, with smashed faces.  In the Palace of Fine Arts this statuary might have made the stones weep.

15

At last the spring song sounded through the streets of Paris with a pagan joy.

There was a blue sky over the city—­so clear and cloudless that if any Zeppelin came before the night, it would have been seen a mile high, as a silver ship, translucent from stem to stern, sailing in an azure sea.  One would not be scared by one of these death-ships on such a day as this, nor believe, until the crash came, that it would drop down destruction upon this dream city, all aglitter in gold and white, with all its towers and spires clean-cut against the sky.