Of the sisters of mercy and the nurses in all these hospitals, also in very many cases volunteers, it would be difficult to speak too highly. The loving care with which they tend and mother the wounded—“mes garçons” they call them—and the grateful affection with which they are rewarded by their patients, are unspeakably touching. I was never in one of the Nancy hospitals during the trying time—far more exacting for the nurses than any operation—when the men’s wounds are being dressed and the agonized cry of some sufferer will sometimes spread its infecting example from bed to bed through almost a whole ward. But no one who has seen at ordinary times the fortitude and cheerfulness with which the French bear their sufferings and talk of their wounds and of the day when they will be able to get up and go to fight again for their beloved country could ever forget the sight of those rows of quiet beds, so different from the wards in an ordinary hospital. There were no horrible diseases, nothing repulsive or unclean, nothing that is the result of decay and sin. A few hours or days or weeks before these weak and helpless sufferers had been young and strong and vigorous, the physical pick of the manhood of France. Now, when they were not talking or reading or smoking, they lay with closed eyes and uncomplaining wistful faces or looked at one like dumb animals with a marvellous inarticulate patience that seemed to ask what it all meant, and why, when diplomatists differ and nations go to war, it is their poor bodies that have to pay the price. War and wounds certainly have the effect of putting the human body in its right place and of doing away with all the false shame and prudery with which we are so apt to surround it. When these thousands of men are well and strong again—or as well and strong as they can ever be—it hardly seems possible that they can ever forget the frank purity of their sweet-faced, tender-handed nurses and sisters of mercy, or the lessons of the dignity of the body and of life which they have unconsciously learnt from them. One day I saw some of the sisters kneeling in the little chapel in the grounds of the Civil Hospital. The choir was singing some kind of a litany, the burden of which was the words “Sauvez la France,” repeated over and over again. It was one of those days when the sound of the guns, from some trick of the wind, as well as from their actual nearness, was more than usually loud, and each time that the three words of the prayer rang out through the open door of the chapel they were followed without a moment’s pause by the booming roar of the heavy shells. And of the two, the cannon that had shattered their limbs or the kneeling women who had soothed and tended them, there was not, I think, much doubt in the minds of the wounded men who were well enough to sit about in the sunny courtyard outside the chapel as to which was the finer force—and the stronger. [Illustration: