commission! I wonder if ever life can look like that again. The heavens arched all blue above New York and the sunshine lay all golden on the city pavements. But that was before I knew. Oh, I had heard about war, even as have you and your next door neighbour. War was battle dates that had to be committed to memory at school. Or if instead of tiresome pages in history it should mobilise before our eyes, why, of course it would be flags flying, bands playing, and handsome heroes marching down Fifth Avenue!
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
