The truth of the matter was that I had long since cultivated the habit of registering definite impressions in a flash, and after a tour of the cots, which took about seven minutes, could have told her the nature of every wound.  Moreover, I knew the men did not want to talk to me, and I felt impertinent hanging round.

But all this was incomprehensible to a Frenchwoman, to whom time is nothing, and who knows how the French in any conditions love to talk.

However, to return to Madame Viviani.

After one futile attempt, when I got lost, I met Madame Lyon and her distinguished but patient friend out in one of the purlieus of Paris where the Lycee of Arts and Crafts has been turned into a hospital for convalescents.

Under the direction of a doctor each convalescent was working at what his affected muscles most needed or could stand.  Those that ran sewing-machines exercised their legs.  Those that made toys and cut wood with the electric machines got a certain amount of arm exercise.  The sewing-machine experts had already made fifty thousand sacks for sand fortifications and breastworks.

From this enormous Lycee (which cost, I was told, five million francs) we drove to the Salpetriere, which in the remote ages before the war, was an old people’s home.  Its extent, comprising, as it does, court after court, gardens, masses of buildings which loom beyond and yet beyond, not only inspired awed reflections of the number of old that must need charity in Paris but made one wonder where they were at the present moment, now that the Salpetriere had been turned into a hospital.  Perhaps, being very old, they had conveniently died.

Here the men made wooden shoes with leather tops for the trenches, cigarette packages, ingenious toys—­the airships and motor ambulances were the most striking; baskets, chairs, lace.

The rooms I visited were in charge of an English infirmiere and were fairly well aired.  Some of the men would soon be well enough to go back to the Front and were merely given occupation during their convalescence.  But in the main the object is to prepare the unfortunates known as reformes for the future.

Since the fighting on the Somme began Madame Lyon has gone several times a month to the recaptured towns, in charge of train-loads of installations for the looted homes of the wretched people.  In one entire village the Germans had left just one saucepan.  Nothing else whatever.

XIII

BRIEF ACCOUNTS OF GREAT WORK

THE DUCHESSE D’UZES

The Duchesse d’Uzes (jeune) was not only one of the reigning beauties of Paris before the war but one of its best-dressed women; nor had she ever been avoided for too serious tendencies.  She went to work the day war began and she has never ceased to work since.  She has started something like seventeen hospitals both at the French front and in Saloniki, and her tireless brain has to its credit several notable inventions for moving field hospitals.