At all costs Paris was not to learn the truth about the war if there were any unpleasant truths to tell. For Paris there must always be victories and no defeats. They must not even know that in war time there were wounded men; otherwise they might get so depressed or so enraged that (thought the French Government) there might be the old cry of "Nous sommes trahis!" with a lopping off of Ministers' heads and dreadful orgies in which the streets of Paris would run red with blood. This reason alone--so utterly unreasonable, as we now know--may explain the farcical situation of the hospitals in Paris during the first two months of the war. Great hotels like the Astoria, Claridge's, and the Majestic had been turned into hospitals magnificently equipped and over-staffed. Nothing that money could buy was left unbought, so that these great palaces might be fully provided with all things necessary for continual streams of wounded men. High society in France gave away its wealth with generous enthusiasm. Whatever faults they might have they tried to wash them clean by charity, full- hearted and overflowing, for the wounded sons of France. Great ladies who had been the beauties of the salons, whose gowns had been the envy of their circles, took off their silks and chiffons and put on the simple dress of the infirmière and volunteered to do the humblest work, the dirty work of kitchen-wenches and scullery-girls and bedroom-maids, so that their hands might help, by any service, the men who had fought for France. French doctors, keen and brilliant men who hold a surgeon's knife with a fine and delicate skill, stood in readiness for the maimed victims of the war. The best brains of French medical science were mobilized in these hospitals of Paris. But the wounded did not come to Paris until the war had dragged on for weeks. After the battle of the Marne, when the wounded were pouring into Orleans and other towns at the rate of seven thousand a day, when it was utterly impossible for the doctors there to deal with all that tide of agony, and when the condition of the French wounded was a scandal to the name of a civilized country, the hospitals of Paris remained empty, or with a few lightly wounded men in a desert of beds. Because they could not speak French, perhaps, these rare arrivals were mostly Turcos and Senegalese, so that when they awakened in these wards and their eyes rolled round upon the white counterpanes, the exquisite flowers and the painted ceilings, and there beheld the beauty of women bending over their bedsides-- women whose beauty was famous through Europe--they murmured "Allahu akbar" in devout ecstasy and believed themselves in a Mohammedan paradise.