From the disfigured regions where the cannon reigns supreme, to the mountains of the South, to the ocean, to the glittering shores of the inland sea, the cry of wounded men echoes throughout the land, and a vast kindred cry seems to rise responsive from the whole world. There is no French town in which the wounds inflicted on the battle-field are not bleeding. Not one which has not accepted the duty of assuaging something of the sum of suffering, just as it bears its part in the sum of mourning;

They came in like two parcels dispatched by the same post, two clumsy, squalid parcels, badly packed, and damaged in transit. Two human forms rolled up in linens and woollens, strapped into strange instruments, one of which enclosed the whole man, like a coffin of zinc and wire. They seemed to be of no particular age; or rather, each might have been a thousand and more, the age of swaddled mummies in the depths of sarcophagi. We washed, combed, and peeled them, and laid them very cautiously betw

I Were modesty banished from the rest of the earth, it would no doubt find a refuge in Mouchon's heart. I see him still as he arrived, on a stretcher full of little pebbles, with his mud be-plastered coat, and his handsome, honest face, like that of a well-behaved child. "You must excuse me," he said; "we can't keep ourselves very clean." "Have you any lice?" asks the orderly, as he undresses him. Mouchon flushes and looks uneasy. "Well, if I have, they don't really belong to me." He has none, b

Mercier is dead, and I saw his corpse weep.... I did not think such a thing possible. The orderly had just washed his face and combed his grey hair. I said: "You are not forty yet, my poor Mercier, and your hair is almost white already." "It is because my life has been a very hard one, and I have had so many sorrows. I have worked so hard... so hard! And I have had so little luck." There are pitiful little wrinkles all over his face; a thousand disappointments have left indelible traces there. A

FEBRUARY-APRIL 1916 We were going northward by forced marches, through a France that was like a mournful garden planted with crosses. We were no longer in doubt as to our appointed destination; every day since we had disembarked at B——our orders had enjoined us to hasten our advance to the fighting units of the Army Corps. This Army Corps was contracting, and drawing itself together hurriedly, its head already in the thick of the fray, its tail still winding along the roads, across the battle-fi

We had had all the windows opened. From their beds, the wounded could see, through the dancing waves of heat, the heights of Berru and Nogent l'Abbesse, the towers of the Cathedral, still crouching like a dying lion in the middle of the plain of Reims, and the chalky lines of the trenches intersecting the landscape. A kind of torpor seemed to hang over the battle-field. Sometimes, a perpendicular column of smoke rose up, in the motionless distance, and the detonation reached us a little while af

Every morning the stretcher-bearers brought Vize-Feldwebel Spat down to the dressing ward, and his appearance always introduced a certain chill in the atmosphere. There are some German wounded whom kind treatment, suffering, or some more obscure agency move to composition with the enemy, and who receive what we do for them with a certain amount of gratitude. Spat was not one of these. For weeks we had made strenuous efforts to snatch him from death, and then to alleviate his sufferings, without

It is a common saying that all men are equal in the presence of suffering, but I know very well that this is not true. Auger! Auger! humble basket-maker of La Charente, who are you, you who seem able to suffer without being unhappy? Why are you touched with grace, whereas Gregoire is not? Why are you the prince of a world in which Gregoire is merely a pariah? Kind ladies who pass through the wards where the wounded lie, and give them cigarettes and sweet-meats, come with me. We will go through t

I One more glance into the dark ward, in which something begins to reign which is not sleep, but merely a kind of nocturnal stupor. The billiard-table has been pushed into a corner; it is loaded with an incoherent mass of linen, bottles, and articles of furniture. A smell of soup and excrements circulates between the stretchers, and seems to insult the slender onyx vases that surmount the cabinet. And now, quickly! quickly! Let us escape on tiptoe into the open air. The night is clear and cold,