The shameless audacity of using a socializing institution, the school, to cultivate national malice in the helpless children! (=4=) If only the children could get one good look at the hell behind the curtain it would be more difficult to beguile and betray them. Let the wonderful Zola tell what the boys in the public schools are _not_ taught and are _not permitted to realize_ till later when they are grown up and are seduced to the battlefield with the crafty cry, “Follow the flag!” Here following are some paragraphs on the battlefield hospital. A military hospital, it may be said, is an institution in which sick and shell-torn men are hastily repaired in order that they may go again to the battle line—perchance to faint or be ripped to pieces again. Thus Zola:[246] “... Outside in the shed the preparations were of another nature: the chests were opened and the contents arranged in order.... On another table were the surgical cases with their blood-curdling array of glittering instruments, probes, forceps, bistouries, scalpels, scissors, saws, an arsenal of implements of every imaginable shape adapted to pierce, cut, dice, rend, crush.... The wagons kept driving up to the entrance in an unbroken stream.... The regular ambulance wagons of the medical department, two-wheeled and four-wheeled, were too few in number to meet the demand ... provision vans, everything on wheels that could be picked up on the battlefield, came rolling up with their ghastly loads; and later in the day carrioles and market-gardeners’ carts were pressed into the service and harnessed to horses that were found straying along the roads.... It was a sight to move the most callous to behold the unloading of those poor wretches, some with the greenish pallor on their faces, others suffused with the purple hue that denotes congestion; many were in a state of coma, others uttered piercing cries of anguish ... the keen knife flashed in the air, there was the faint rasping of the saw barely audible, the blood spurted in short sharp jets.... As soon as the subject had been operated on another was brought in, and they followed one another in such quick succession that there was barely time to pass the sponge over the protecting oil-cloth. At the extremity of the grass plot, screened from sight by a clump of lilac bushes, they had set up a kind of morgue whither they carried the bodies of the dead, which were removed from the beds without a moment’s delay in order to make room for the living, and this receptacle also served to receive the amputated legs and arms, whatever débris of flesh and bone remained upon the table.... Rents in tattered, shell-torn uniforms disclosed gaping wounds, some of which had received a hasty dressing on the battlefield, while others were still raw and bleeding. There were feet, still encased in their coarse shoes, crushed into a mass like