on the simple dress of the infirmière and volunteered to do the
humblest work, the dirty work of kitchen-wenches and scullery-girls
and bedroom-maids, so that their hands might help, by any service,
the men who had fought for France. French doctors, keen and
brilliant men who hold a surgeon's knife with a fine and delicate skill,
stood in readiness for the maimed victims of the war. The best brains
of French medical science were mobilized in these hospitals of Paris.

But the wounded did not come to Paris until the war had dragged on
for weeks. After the battle of the Marne, when the wounded were
pouring into Orleans and other towns at the rate of seven thousand a
day, when it was utterly impossible for the doctors there to deal with
all that tide of agony, and when the condition of the French wounded
was a scandal to the name of a civilized country, the hospitals of
Paris remained empty, or with a few lightly wounded men in a desert
of beds. Because they could not speak French, perhaps, these rare
arrivals were mostly Turcos and Senegalese, so that when they
awakened in these wards and their eyes rolled round upon the white
counterpanes, the exquisite flowers and the painted ceilings, and
there beheld the beauty of women bending over their bedsides--
women whose beauty was famous through Europe--they murmured
"Allahu akbar" in devout ecstasy and believed themselves in a
Mohammedan paradise.

It was a comedy in which there was a frightful tragedy. The doctors
and surgeons standing by these empty beds, wandering through
operating-theatres magnificently appointed, asked God why their
hands were idle when so many soldiers of France were dying for lack
of help, and why Paris, the nerve-centre of all railway lines, so close
to the front, where the fields were heaped with the wreckage of the