What an impressive personage! He was tall and, it seemed to me, of enormous proportions. A typically military face--no one could mistake it--deep features over which the fingers and the nails of the sculptor must have passed again and again; on the nose, too, the sculptor’s thumb must have been at work, pressing and moulding delicately the lumps of flesh; a bristling white moustache and imperial, of the kind specially reserved for soldiers advanced in age. He wore an old general’s uniform, which many give up with the greatest difficulty, like old ideas. Gold, jewellery, velvet, and silk facings adorned his body with such refulgence that the imagination could hardly conceive that, beneath this barbarous splendour, there were lungs, muscles, bones and a shrivelled skin covered with grey hair. A look escaped from beneath his bushy eyebrows, which was at once violent, questioning, and suggestive of unutterable pride. He came forward in grave silence. I expected a scene; but from that moment what took place has remained mysteriously veiled in my memory. In one single movement everybody there took up a certain position, and they made a correct military salute according to the rules taught so patiently in barracks to recruits from the country. Faces imperceptibly became rigid. The light in one’s eyes became dull and fixed. Ten centuries of a habit imposed and accepted petrified tongues, muscles and minds. Some thistleseed flew away with the breeze. As I saw it fluttering, white, woolly, without weight, I thought--I don’t know why--of that subtle, fine, delicate, critical spirit. It vanished in a gust of wind. A big insect loaded with pollen could be heard buzzing around. I felt stupid! A long pause; then the white-moustached gentleman decided to let these words fall from his lips: “Good-day, gentlemen!” The visit began in the rooms which had been packed with the wounded from the Marne front. There young men were lying who had been face to face with War, and who had calmly recognised it as the old Devil of the Species. From that time they spoke of it just as they always will, now that three years of blood, suffering and torture have decimated, maimed and broken them. But nobody bothered about their thoughts. Sheets were drawn back, bandages were undone, wounds were left open to the air. It was now a question of “cases” and of lesions. A scientific discussion was commencing, to which I listened with an eager curiosity. As I have said, doctors were present who were princes in their profession. They came on the scene with minds, I thought, which were profoundly independent--even aggressive. And I looked forward to an interesting controversy. M. Dufrêne was closely examining some one’s thigh, in which a dark, quivering hole had been made by a shell. “What do you put in it, Proby?” he said. Professor Proby began a detailed explanation of the way in which such wounds ought to be treated.