pieces of shell, bullets and shrapnel, and knowing all the time
what would happen. He has lost both hands.

Since my return to America the problems of those who care for the sick
and wounded have been further complicated, among the Allies, by the
inhuman use of asphyxiating gases.

Sir John French says of these gases:

"The effect of this poison is not merely disabling, or even painlessly
fatal, as suggested in the German press. Those of its victims who do
not succumb on the field and who can be brought into hospitals suffer
acutely and, in a large proportion of cases, die a painful and
lingering death. Those who survive are in little better case, as the
injury to their lungs appears to be of a permanent character and
reduces them to a condition that points to their being invalids for
life."

I have received from the front one of the respirators given out to the
troops to be used when the gas clouds appear.

"It is prepared with hypophosphite of soda," wrote the surgeon who
sent it, "and all they have to do before putting it on is to dip it in
the water in the trenches. They are all supplied in addition with
goggles, which are worn on their caps,"

This is from the same letter:

"That night a German soldier was brought in wounded, and jolly glad he
was to be taken. He told us he had been turned down three times for
phthisis--tuberculosis--and then in the end was called up and put into
the trenches after eight weeks' training. All of which is very
significant. Another wounded German told the men at the ambulance that
they must move on as soon as they could, as very soon the Germans
would be in Calais.

"All the German soldiers write home now on the official cards, which
have Calais printed on the top of them!"

Not all. I have before me a card from a German officer in the trenches
in France. It is a good-natured bit of raillery, with something of
grimness underneath.

"_Dear Madame_:

"'I nibble them'--Joffre. See your article in the _Saturday Evening
Post_ of May 29th, 1915. Really, Joffre has had time! It is
September now, and we are not nibbled yet. Still we stand deep in
France. Au revoir a Paris, Madame."

He signs it "Yours truly," and then his name.

Not Calais, then, but Paris!

CHAPTER XXXVII

AN ARMY OF CHILDREN

It is undeniably true that the humanities are failing us as the war
goes on. Not, thank God, the broad humanity of the Red Cross, but that
individual