death machines.

In the Great Hall through which in the days of peace pretty women
used to wander with raised eyebrows and little cries of "Ciel!" (even
French women revolted against the most advanced among the
Futurists), there was a number of extraordinary contrivances of a
mechanical kind which shocked one's imagination, and they were
being used by French soldiers in various uniforms and of various
grades, with twisted limbs, and paralytic gestures. One young man,
who might have been a cavalry officer, was riding a queer bicycle
which never moved off its pedestal, though its wheels revolved to the
efforts of its rider. He pedalled earnestly and industriously, though
obviously his legs had stiffened muscles, so that every movement
gave him pain. Another man, "bearded like the bard," sat with his
back to the wall clutching at two rings suspended from a machine and
connected with two weights. Monotonously and with utterly
expressionless eyes, he raised and lowered his arms a few inches or
so, in order to bring back their vitality, which had been destroyed by a
nervous shock. Many wheels were turning in that great room and
men were strapped to them, as though in some torture chamber,
devilishly contrived. In this place, however, the work was to defeat the
cruelties of War the Torturer, after it had done its worst with human
flesh.

The worst was in other rooms, where poor wrecks of men lay face
downwards in hot-air boxes, where they stayed immovable and silent
as though in their coffins, or with half their bodies submerged in
electrolysed baths. Nurses were massaging limbs which had been
maimed and smashed by shell-fire, and working with fine and delicate
patience at the rigid fingers of soldiers, some of whom had lost their
other arms, so that unless they could use their last remaining fingers,
three or four to a hand, they would be useless for any work in the
world. But most pitiable of all were the long rows of the paralysed and
the blind, who lay in the hospital ward, motionless and sightless, with
smashed faces. In the Palace of Fine Arts this statuary might have
made the stones weep.

15

At last the spring song sounded through the streets of Paris with a
pagan joy.

There was a blue sky over the city--so clear and cloudless that if any
Zeppelin came before the night, it would have been seen a mile high,
as a silver ship, translucent from stem to stern, sailing in an azure
sea. One would not be scared b