Why not train him? Why not teach him a trade? Build a bridge that will lead him from the hospital over into normal life. That is better than throwing him out among the derelicts. Pauperism is an ill reward for the service that shattered him, and it is poor business for a world that needs workers. If these crippled ones are not permitted to reconstruct their working life, the French nation will be dragged down by the multitude of maimed unemployable men, who are being turned loose from the hospitals--unfit to fight, untrained to work: a new and ever-increasing Army of The Miserable. The stout backbone and stanch spirit of even France will be snapped by this dead-weight of suffering. In our field hospital at Fumes, we had one ward where a wave of gaiety swept the twenty beds each morning. It came when the leg of the bearded man was dressed by the nurse. He thrust it out from under the covering: a raw stump, off above the ankle. It was an old wound, gone sallow with the skin lapped over. The men in the cots close by shouted with laughter at the look of it, and the man himself laughed till he brought pain to the wound. Then he would lay hold of the sides of the bed to control his merriment. The dressing proceeded, with brisk comment from the wardful of men, and swift answers from the patient under treatment. The grim wound had so obviously made an end of the activity of that particular member and, as is war's way, had done it so evilly, with such absence of beauty, that only the human spirit could cover that hurt. So he and his comrades had made it the object of gaiety. For legless men, there are a dozen trades open, if they are 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."