It is the bursting of shrapnel that causes the face mutilations, and although the first room we visited at Chaptal was a witness to the marvelous restorative work the surgeons are able to accomplish—­sometimes—­many weeks and even months must elapse while the face is not only red and swollen, but twisted, the mouth almost parallel with the nose—­and often there is no nose—­a whole cheek missing, an eye gone, or both; sometimes the whole mouth and chin have been blown away; and I saw one face that had nothing on its flat surface but a pipe inserted where the nose had been.  Another was so terrible that I did not dare to take a second look, and I have only a vague and mercifully fading impression of a hideousness never before seen in this world.

On the other hand I saw a man propped up in bed, with one entire side of his face bandaged, his mouth twisted almost into his right ear, and a mere remnant of nose, reading a newspaper with his remaining eye and apparently quite happy.

The infirmiere told me that sometimes the poor fellows would cry—­they are almost all very young—­and lament that no girl would have them now; but she always consoled them by the assurance that men would be so scarce after the war that girls would take anything they could get.

In one of the wards a young soldier was sitting on the edge of his cot, receiving his family, two women of middle age and a girl of about seventeen.  His face was bandaged down to the bridge of his nose, but the lower part was uninjured.  He may or may not have been permanently blind.  The two older women—­his mother and aunt, no doubt—­looked stolid, as women of that class always do, but the girl sat staring straight before her with an expression of bitter resentment I shall never forget.  She looked as if she were giving up every youthful illusion, and realized that Life is the enemy of man, and more particularly of woman.  Possibly her own lover was in the trenches.  Or perhaps this mutilated boy beside her was the first lover of her youth.  One feels far too impersonal for curiosity in these hospitals and it did not occur to me to ask.

Madame Balli had also brought several boxes of delicacies for the private kitchen of the infirmieres, where fine dishes may be concocted for appetites still too weak to be tempted by ordinary hospital fare:  soup extract, jellies, compotes, cocoa, preserves, etc.  Mr. Holman-Black came staggering after us with one of these boxes, I remember, down the long corridor that led to the private quarters of the nurses.  One walks miles in these hospitals.

A number of American men in Paris are working untiringly for Paris, notably those in our War Relief Clearing House—­H.O.  Beatty, Randolph Mordecai, James R. Barbour, M.P.  Peixotto, Ralph Preston, Whitney Warren, Hugh R. Griffen, James Hazen Hyde, Walter Abbott, Charles R. Scott, J.J.  Hoff, Rev. Dr. S.N.  Watson, George Munroe, Charles Carroll, J. Ridgeley Carter, H. Herman Harges—­but