And now I have seen war. Every way I turn I am looking on men with broken bodies and women with broken hearts. War is not merely the hell that may pass at Verdun or the Somme in the agony of a day or a night that ends in death. War is worse. War is that big strong fellow with eyes burned out when he “went over the top,” whom I saw learning to walk by a strip of oilcloth laid on the floor of the Home for the Blind in London. They’re teaching him now to make baskets for a living! War is that boy in his twenties without any legs whom I met in Regents Park in a wheel chair for the rest of his life! War is that peasant from whom to-day I inquired my way in one of the little _banlieues_ of Paris. There was the _Croix de Guerre_ in his coat lapel. But he had to set down on the ground his basket of vegetables to point down the Quai de Bercy with his remaining arm. You know how a Frenchman just has to gesture when he talks? The stump of the other arm twitched a horrible accompaniment as he indicated my direction! Those are brave men who are dying on all the battlefields for their native lands. But oh, the bravery of these men who must live for their countries! These who have lost their eyes and their arms and their legs are as common over here as, why, as, say, men with brown hair. And these are terrible enough. But the men who have lost their faces! So long as they shall live, in every one’s eyes into which they look, they must see a shudder of horror reflecting as in a looking glass their old agony. God in Heaven pity the men who have lost their faces! The greatest sculptors in the world are busy to-day making faces to be fastened on. Like this you’ve got to go through Europe these days with a sob in the throat. I turn to the difficult details of living for relief from the awful drama of existence. In Paris there is the nicest United States ambassador that ever was sent in a black frock coat to represent his country abroad. In the course of my travels there are embassies I have met who are about as useful to the wayfaring American in a foreign land as a Rogers plaster group on a parlour table. But you arrive at Mr. Sharpe’s embassy in the Rue de Chaillot and it doesn’t matter at all if it happens to be perhaps 4:33 and his reception hour closed at, say, 4:31. He says, “Come right in.” Yes, he talks like that, not at all in the tone of royalty. “When’d you get in town?” he asks as genially as if it might be Albany or Detroit instead of Paris. By this time you’re sitting in a chair drawn up to his desk and discussing the last Democratic victory. “How’s Charlie Murphy standing now with the administration?” perhaps he asks, and then pretty soon, “But what can I do for you in Paris?”