World War, 1914-1918 -- Atrocities; World War, 1914-1918 -- Hospitals; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
Through the recreation hall, where plays and motion pictures have made
gay evenings in time past before the war, file the slow streams of
the crippled, backwash of the slaughter to the North. To the soldiers
it is a matter of routine, one more item in the long sacrifice.
They fit on the member and test it in a businesslike way, with no
sentimentalizing. Too many are there in the room, and other hundreds
on the pleasant sunny lawns, in like case, for the individual to feel
himself the lonely victim. There are no jests--the war has gone too far
for superficial gayety--and there is no hint of despair, for France is
being saved. The crippled man is sober and long-enduring.
There in that room I saw the war as I have not seen it in five months
of active service at the front. For yonder on the Yser we had the
dramatic reliefs of sudden bombardment, and flashing aeroplanes. But
here were only broken men. There were no whole men at all in the long
Salle. The spirit of the men was all that it ever was. But the body
could no longer respond. They stood in long line, stripped to the waist
or with leg bare waiting their turn with the doctor and the apparatus
expert. There is the look of an automaton to an artificial limb, as
if the men in their troubled motions were marionettes. And then the
imagination, abnormally stimulated by so much suffering, plays other
tricks. And it seemed to me as if one were looking in at the window
of one of those shameful "Halls of Anatomy" in a city slum, where
life-size figures lie exposed with grotesque wounds on the wax flesh.
But here was the crackle of the leather straps, and the snapping of
the spring at the knee and elbow-joint of the mechanism, and the slow
moving up and filing past of the line, as man after man was tested for
flexibility. Here is the army of France--here is the whole vast problem
flowing through one door and gathered in one room.
American money is helping to reëducate these broken men, teaching
them trades. There at the Maison Blanche, our fellow-countrymen have
already trained 563 men, and at the Grand Palais 257. As I write this,
701 maimed men are still in course of being trained, and the number
in the agricultural school has grown to 90. Altogether 2,000 maimed
soldiers have been trained through American help. Most of the money for
this work has been raised by the "American Committee for Training in
Suitable Trades the Maimed Soldiers of France," of which Mrs. Edmund
Lincoln Baylies is Chairman. The president of the society in France in
control of this work is B. J. Shoninger, the former president of the
American Chamber of Commerce in Paris.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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