Already the French had realized the necessity of creating agencies for bringing back into a life of activity and service the large numbers of seriously wounded--to find for them suitable labor and to reëducate their crippled faculties so that they could support themselves and take heart once more. Schools were started for the blind and the deaf, of whom the war has made a fearful number. I remember meeting one of these pupils, a young officer, blind, with one arm gone, and wounded in the face. On his breast was the Service Cross and the cross of the Legion of Honor. He was led into the room by his wife, a young school teacher from Algeria, who had given up her position and come to Paris to nurse her fiancé back to life and hope. He was being taught telegraphy by an American teacher of the blind. In such ways the people of Paris kept themselves from eating their hearts out in grief and anxiety. * * * * * At three o'clock in the afternoons, when the day's _communiqué_ was given out from the War Office, little groups gathered in front of the windows of certain shops where the official report was posted. They would scan the usually colorless lines in silence and turn away, as though saying to themselves,--"Not to-day--then to-morrow!" The newsless newspapers abounded in something perhaps more heartening than favorable reports from the front--an endless chronicle of bravery and devotion, of valor, heroism, and chivalry in the trench. That is what fed the anxious hearts of the waiting people, details of the large, heroic picture that France was creating so near at hand, _là-bas_. There were few occasions for popular gatherings. The taste for "demonstrations" of any sort had gone out of the people. Sympathetic crowds met the trains from Switzerland that contained the first of the "_grands blessés_" the militarily useless wounded whom Germany at last concluded to give back to their homes. And I recall one pathetic sight which I witnessed by accident--the arrival of one of the long trains from the front bringing back the first "_permissionnaires_" those soldiers who had been given a three or four days' leave after nine months in the trenches. In front of the Gare de l'Est a great throng of women and children were kept back by rope and police, until at the appearance of the uniformed men at the exit they surged forward and sought out each her own man. There were little laughs and sobs and kisses under the flaring gas lamps of the station yard until the last _poilu_ had been claimed, and the crowd melted away into Paris. * * * * *