to Paris on December 31, and between January 2nd and
14th, 1918, {227} went over the British front with Generals Cator and
Rawlinson. On the 16th he was at Soissons with the French.

For the next few days the examination of the French front continued at
and near the Chemin des Dames sector.

On January 27th he went with some French officers and men and a number
of American officers to look into the work of the 6th French army
training school, where artillery practice was in progress at
Fere-en-Tardenois. He was standing behind a mortar, the center man of
the five officers watching the gun crew fire the mortar, when a shell
burst, or detonated, inside the gun.

The entire gun crew was blown to pieces. The four officers on either
side of General Wood were killed. He himself received a wound in the
muscles of the left arm and lost part of the right sleeve of his
tunic. Six fragments of the shell passed through his clothing and two
of them killed the officers on either side of him. He was the only man
within a space of twelve feet of the mortar who was not instantly
killed. Many were wounded, including two others of our own officers.

{228}

After a night in the field first-aid hospital, where his arm was
dressed, he motored approximately a hundred miles to Paris the next
day and went into the French officers' hospital in the Hotel Ritz.

This hospital was in the old portion of the Ritz Hotel. General Wood
was the first foreign officer to be admitted to it. It was full of
wounded French officers and men from the different fronts; some of
them from Salonika; some sent back from Germany, hopelessly crippled,
and held as unfit for further service by the Germans; and many from
the Western front.

Here he got very near the soul of the French Army and came in touch
with that indomitable spirit which made that army fight best and
hardest when things looked darkest. Thanks to an excellent physical
condition he made a rapid recovery, described by French surgeons as
found only among the very young. He was a guest of the French
Government while at the hospital and received every possible courtesy.
On the 16th of February after having talked with many of the French
officers in the hospital and called, at their request, upon
Clemenceau, President Poincare, Joffre and {229} others, he left Paris
entirely cured of his slight wound and proceeded to the headquarters
of the French Army of the North at Vizay. There he met and talked