The wounded were hardly less pitiful.  They were so many and so thickly did they fall that the ambulance service at first was not sufficient to handle them.  They lay in the fields or forests sometimes for a day before they were picked up, suffering unthinkable agony.  And after they were placed in cars and started back toward Paris the tortures continued.  Some of the trains of wounded that arrived outside the city had not been opened in two days.  The wounded had been without food or water.  They had not been able to move from the positions in which in torment they had thrown themselves.  The foul air had produced gangrene.  And when the cars were opened the stench was so fearful that the Red Cross people fell back as though from a blow.  For the wounded Paris is full of hospitals—­French, English, and American.  And the hospitals are full of splendid men.  Each one once had been physically fit or he would not have been passed to the front; and those among them who are officers are finely bred, finely educated, or they would not be officers.  But each matched his good health, his good breeding, and knowledge against a broken piece of shell or steel bullet, and the shell or bullet won.  They always will win.  Stephen Crane called a wound “the red badge of courage.”  It is all of that.  And the man who wears that badge has all my admiration.  But I cannot help feeling also the waste of it.  I would have a standing army for the same excellent reason that I insure my house; but, except in self-defence, no war.  For war—­and I have seen a lot of it—­is waste.  And waste is unintelligent.

Chapter XI War Correspondents

The attitude of the newspaper reader toward the war correspondent who tries to supply him with war news has always puzzled me.

One might be pardoned for suggesting that their interests are the same.  If the correspondent is successful, the better service he renders the reader.  The more he is permitted to see at the front, the more news he is allowed to cable home, the better satisfied should be the man who follows the war through the “extras.”

But what happens is the reverse of that.  Never is the “constant reader” so delighted as when the war correspondent gets the worst of it.  It is the one sure laugh.  The longer he is kept at the base, the more he is bottled up, “deleted,” censored, and made prisoner, the greater is the delight of the man at home.  He thinks the joke is on the war correspondent.  I think it is on the “constant reader.”  If, at breakfast, the correspondent fails to supply the morning paper with news, the reader claims the joke is on the news-gatherer.  But if the milkman fails to leave the milk, and the baker the rolls, is the joke on the milkman and the baker or is it on the “constant reader”?  Which goes hungry?