The Red Cross has a large children’s hospital at Evian in the villas and buildings of the Hotel Chatelet.  This hospital deals with the contagious cases.  It has others, especially one at the Chateau des Halles, thirty kilometers from Lyons, which take the devitalised, convalescent and tubercular cases.  The Chateau des Halles is a splendidly built modern building, arranged in an ideal way for hospital use.  It stands at the head of a valley, with an all day sun exposure and large grounds.  Close to the Chateau are a number of small villages in which it is possible to lodge the repatries in families.  This is an important part of the repatrie’s problem, as after their many partings they fight fiercely against any further separations.  One of the chief reasons for having the Convalescent Hospital out in the country is that families can be quartered in the villages and so kept together.

The pathetic hunger of these people for one another after they have been so long divided, was illustrated for me on my return journey to Paris.  A man of the tradesman class had been to Evian to meet his wife and his boy of about eleven.  They were among the lucky ones, for they had a home to go to.  He was not prepossessing in appearance.  He had a weak face, lined with anxiety, broken teeth and limp hair.  His wife, as so often happens in French marriages, had evidently been the manageress.  She was unbeautiful in rusty black; her clothes were the ill-assorted make-shifts of the civilian who escapes from Germany.  Her eyes were shifty with the habit of fear and sunken with the weariness of crying.  The boy was a bright little fellow, full of defiance and anecdotes of his recent captors.

When I entered the carriage, they were sitting huddled together—­the man in the middle, with an arm about either of them.  He kept pressing them to him, kissing them by turn in a spasmodic unrestrained fashion, as if he still feared that he might lose them and could not convince himself of the happy truth that they were once again together.  The woman did not respond to his embraces; she seemed indifferent to him, indifferent to life, indifferent to any prospects.  The boy seemed fond of his father, but embarrassed by his starved demonstrativeness.

I listened to their conversation.  The man’s talk was all of the future—­what splendid things he would do for them.  How, as long as they lived, he would never waste a moment from their sides.  It appeared that he had been at Tours, on a business trip when the war broke out, and could not get back to Lille before the Germans arrived there.  For three and a half years he had lived in suspense, while everything he loved had lain behind the German lines.  The woman contributed no suggestions to his brilliant plans.  She clung to him, but she tried to divert his affection.  When she spoke it was of small domestic abuses:  the exorbitant prices she had had to pay for food; the way in which the soldiery had stolen her pots and pans; the insolence