moke I gazed at the oddest crowd in one of these
clubs off the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Slavs with matted hair,
American girls in Futurist frocks, Italians like figures out of pre-
Raphaelite frescoes, men with monkey faces and monkey manners,
men with the faces of mediaeval saints a little debauched by devilish
temptations, filled the long bare room, spoke in strange tongues to
each other, and made love passionately in the universal language
and in dark corners provided with ragged divans. A dwarf creature
perched on a piano stool teased the keys of an untuned piano and
drew forth adorable melody, skipping the broken notes with great
agility. ... It was the same old Paris, even in time of war.

14

The artists of neutral countries who still kept to their lodgings in the
Quartier Latin and fanned the little flame of inspiration which kept
them warm though fuel is dear, could not get any publicity for their
works. There was no autumn or spring salon in the Palais des Beaux-
Arts, where every year till war came one might watch the progress of
French art according to the latest impulse of the time stirring the
emotions of men and women who claim the fullest liberties even for
their foolishness. War had killed the Cubists, and many of the
Futurists had gone to the front to see the odd effects of scarlet blood
on green grass. The Grand Palais was closed to the public. Yet there
were war pictures here, behind closed doors, and sculpture stranger
than anything conceived by Marinetti. I went to see the show, and
when I came out again into the sunlight of the gardens, I felt very
cold, and there was a queer trembling in my limbs.

The living pictures and the moving statuary in the Grand Palais
exhibited the fine arts of war as they are practised by civilized men
using explosive shells, with bombs, shrapnel, hand-grenades,
mitrailleuses, trench-mines, and other ingenious instruments by which
the ordinary designs of God may be re-drawn and re-shaped to suit
the modern tastes of men. I saw here the Spring Exhibition of the
Great War, as it is catalogued by surgeons, doctors, and scientific
experts in wounds and nerve diseases.

It was not a pretty sight, and the only thing that redeemed its ugliness
was the way in which all those medical men were devoting
themselves to the almost hopeless task of untwisting the contorted
limbs of those victims of the war spirit, and restoring the shape of
man botched by the artists of the