One English major, before he reached his own firing-line, was hit by a bursting shell in three places.  While he was lying in the American ambulance hospital at Neuilly the doctor said to him: 

“This cot next to yours is the only one vacant.  Would you object if we put a German in it?”

“By no means,” said the major; “I haven’t seen one yet.”

The stories the English officers told us at La Rue’s and Maxim’s by contrast with the surroundings were all the more grewsome.  Seeing them there it did not seem possible that in a few hours these same fit, sun-tanned youths in khaki would be back in the trenches, or scouting in advance of them, or that only the day before they had been dodging death and destroying their fellow men.

Maxim’s, which now reminds one only of the last act of “The Merry Widow,” was the meeting-place for the French and English officers from the front; the American military attaches from our embassy, among whom were soldiers, sailors, aviators, marines; the doctors and volunteer nurses from the American ambulance, and the correspondents who by night dined in Paris and by day dodged arrest and other things on the firing-line, or as near it as they could motor without going to jail.  For these Maxim’s was the clearing-house for news of friends and battles.  Where once were the supper-girls and the ladies of the gold-mesh vanity-bags now were only men in red and blue uniforms, men in khaki, men in bandages.  Among them were English lords and French princes with titles that dated from Agincourt to Waterloo, where their ancestors had met as enemies.  Now those who had succeeded them, as allies, were, over a sole Marguery, discussing air-ships, armored automobiles, and mitrailleuses.

At one table Arthur H. Frazier, of the American embassy, would be telling an English officer that a captain of his regiment who was supposed to have been killed at Courtrai had, like a homing pigeon, found his way to the hospital at Neuilly and wanted to be reported “safe” at Lloyds.  At another table a French lieutenant would describe a raid made by the son of an American banker in Paris who is in command of an armed automobile.  “He swept his gun only once—­so,” the Frenchman explained, waving his arm across the champagne and the broiled lobster, “and he caught a general and two staff-officers.  He cut them in half.”  Or at another table you would listen to a group of English officers talking in wonder of the Germans’ wasteful advance in solid formation.

“They were piled so high,” one of them relates, “that I stopped firing.  They looked like gray worms squirming about in a bait-box.  I can shoot men coming at me on their feet, but not a mess of arms and legs.”

“I know,” assents another; “when we charged the other day we had to advance over the Germans that fell the night before, and my men were slipping and stumbling all over the place.  The bodies didn’t give them any foothold.”