We took but a cat-nap that night, and in the morning set down the score on our love affair.  The record indicates that during the day Henry had lost; during the night he had won.  He put it down in his black book against the time when we should get to Paris, where money would buy things.  For we ate at camps, slept in hospitals or in barns or in mess rooms of the ambulance men, and day by day and night after night we saw much misery and were “acquainted with grief.”  There are so many kinds of hospitals in France!  The great streams of broken men that flow unceasingly down from the front are divided as they reach the base hospitals and field hospitals into scores of smaller currents, each flowing to a separate place, where specialists treat the various cases.  The blind go one way; those dumb with shell-shock go another; jaw cases separate from men with scalp wounds, and hip fractures are divided from shoulder fractures as the sheep from the goats.  Travelling about among the hospitals one picks up curious unrelated and unexplained bits of information; as, for instance, that the British Tommy is the most patient man in Europe under pain.  He likes to distinguish between himself and his wound and is likely to reply to the doctor any fine morning, “Me?  Oh, I’m right at the top form, Sir; but my leg is bothering me a bit, Sir!” The Canadian isn’t so game under a roof as he is under the open sky and in the charge.  And the American grunts more than he should.  But here is a queer thing.  The French tubercular soldier is despondent.  With Americans, tuberculosis breeds hope.  Perhaps it is the buoyancy of the young blood of our country; but no American feels he is ever going to die with tuberculosis.  He feels he is hit hard; that it may take six months or a year to get on his feet; after that—­he goes on dreaming his dream.  But the tubercular French soldiers are the saddest looking men in Europe.

Back in Kansas last spring we had heard a story to the effect that the Germans were inoculating the French and Belgians behind the lines of the allies with tubercular bacteria.  We asked French and American and British doctors about that story, and they all answered that there was nothing to it.  The doctors told us that the Germans have a cheaper and better way to fill France with tuberculosis than by wasting serum on their enemies.  And then, one day in a tuberculosis hospital we picked up this story, which explained what the doctors meant.

We met a young man from Lille.  It was his birthday; Henry bought him a bouquet.  He told us his story.  He said: 

“Three years ago when the war broke out I was 19 years old and was living in Lille with my parents.  The Germans came to our house one day with their guns and took me away.  They took me to a town in Germany; I think it was Essen, where they made me work in an iron or steel mill.  I worked fourteen hours a day, slept on straw outside the works in a shed, had only the clothes they took me in and had only bran to eat!”