trained.
They can be made into tailors, typists, mechanicians. The soldiers'
schools, already established, report success in shoemaking, for
instance. The director sends us this word:--

"From the first we had foreseen for this the greatest success--the
results have surpassed our hopes. We are obliged to double the size of
the building, and increase the number of professors.

"Why?

"Because, more than any other profession, that of shoemaking is the most
feasible in the country, in the village, in the small hamlet. This is
the one desire of most of these wounded soldiers: before everything,
they wish to be able to return to their homes. And all the more if a
wife and children wait them there, in a little house with a patch of
garden. Out of our fifty men now learning shoemaking, twenty-nine were
once sturdy farm laborers. The profession is not fatiguing and, in spite
of our fears, not one of our leg-amputated men has given up his
apprenticeship on account of fatigue or physical inability."

Very many of the soldiers are maimed in hand or arm. On the broad beach
of La Panne, in front of the Ocean Hospital of Dr. Depage, a young
soldier talked with my wife one afternoon. Early in the war his right
arm had been shot through the bicep muscle. He had been sent to London,
where a specialist with infinite care linked the nerves together. Daily
the wounded boy willed strength into the broken member, till at last he
found he could move the little finger. It was his hope to bring action
back to the entire hand, finger by finger.

"You can't do anything--you can't even write," they said to him. So he
met that, by schooling his left hand to write.

"Your fighting days are over," they said. He went to a shooting gallery,
and with his left arm learned how to hold a rifle and aim it. Through
the four months of his convalescence he practised to be worthy of the
front line. The military authorities could not put up an objection that
he did not meet. So he won his way back to the Yser trenches. And there
he had received his second hurt and this time the enemy wounded him
thoroughly. And now he was sitting on the sands wondering what the
future held for him.

Spirit like that does not deserve to be broken by despair. Apparatus has
been devised to supply the missing section of the arm, and such a trade
as toy-making offers a livelihood. It is carried on with a sense of fun
even in the absence of all previous education. One-armed m