and he couldn't work, for his job needed two
arms, and he had given one, up yonder on the Marne. He drifted from shop
to shop in Paris. But he didn't know a trade. Life was through with him,
so one day, he shot himself.

That, we learn from authoritative sources, is the story of more than one
broken soldier of Joffre's army.

To be shot clean dead is an easier fate than to be turned loose into
life, a cripple, who must beg his way about. Shall these men who have
defended France be left to rot? All they ask is to be allowed to work.
It is gallant and stirring to fight, and when wounded the soldier is
tenderly cared for. But when he comes out, broken, he faces the
bitterest thing in war. After the hospital--what? Too bad, he's
hurt--but there is no room in the trades for any but a trained man.

Why not train him? Why not teach him a trade? Build a bridge that will
lead him from the hospital over into normal life. That is better than
throwing him out among the derelicts. Pauperism is an ill reward for the
service that shattered him, and it is poor business for a world that
needs workers. If these crippled ones are not permitted to reconstruct
their working life, the French nation will be dragged down by the
multitude of maimed unemployable men, who are being turned loose from
the hospitals--unfit to fight, untrained to work: a new and
ever-increasing Army of The Miserable. The stout backbone and stanch
spirit of even France will be snapped by this dead-weight of suffering.

In our field hospital at Fumes, we had one ward where a wave of gaiety
swept the twenty beds each morning. It came when the leg of the bearded
man was dressed by the nurse. He thrust it out from under the covering:
a raw stump, off above the ankle. It was an old wound, gone sallow with
the skin lapped over. The men in the cots close by shouted with laughter
at the look of it, and the man himself laughed till he brought pain to
the wound. Then he would lay hold of the sides of the bed to control
his merriment. The dressing proceeded, with brisk comment from the
wardful of men, and swift answers from the patient under treatment. The
grim wound had so obviously made an end of the activity of that
particular member and, as is war's way, had done it so evilly, with such
absence of beauty, that only the human spirit could cover that hurt. So
he and his comrades had made it the object of gaiety.

For legless men, there are a dozen trades open, if they are