These pictures which I have painted are typical of some of the things that the American Red Cross is doing.  They are isolated examples, which by no means cover all its work.  There are the rolling canteens which it has instituted, which follow the French armies.  There are the rest houses it has built on the French line of communications for poilus who are going on leave or returning.  There is the farm for the mutilated, where they are taught to be specialists in certain branches of agriculture, despite their physical curtailments.  There is the great campaign against tuberculosis which it is waging.  There are its well-conceived warehouses, stored with medical supplies and military and relief necessities, spreading in a great net-work of usefulness and connected by ambulance transport throughout the whole of the stricken part of France.  There are its hospitals, both military and civil.  There is the “Lighthouse” for men wounded in battle, founded by Miss Holt in Paris.

I visited this Lighthouse; it is a place infinitely brave and pathetic.  Most of the men were picked heroes at the war; they wear their decorations in proof of it.  They are greater heroes than ever now.  Nothing has more deeply moved me than my few hours among those sightless eyes.  In many cases the faces are hideously marred, the eyelids being quite grown together.  In several cases besides the eyes, the arms or legs have gone.  I have talked and written a good deal about the courage which this war has inspired in ordinary men; but the courage of these blinded men, who once were ordinary, leaves me silent and appalled.  They are happy—­how and why I cannot understand.  Most of them have been taught at the Lighthouse how to overcome their disability and are earning their living as weavers, stenographers, potters, munition-workers.  Quite a number of them have families to support.  The only complaint that is made against them by their brother-workmen is that they are too rapid; they set too strenuous a pace for the men with eyes.  It is a fact that in all trades where sensitiveness of touch is an asset, blindness has increased their efficiency.  This is peculiarly so at the Sevres pottery-works where I saw them making the moulds for retorts.  A soldier, who was teaching a seeing person Braille, explained his own quickness of perception when he exclaimed, “Ah, madame, it is your eyes which prevent you from seeing!”

I heard some of the stories of the men.  There was a captain who, after he had been wounded and while there was yet time to save his sight, insisted on being taken to his General that he might inform him about a German mine.  When his mission was completed, his chance of seeing was forever ended.

There was a lieutenant who was blinded in a raid and left for dead out in No Man’s Land.  Just before he became unconscious, he placed two lumps of earth in line in the direction which led back to his own trenches.  He knew the direction by the sound of the retreating footsteps.  Whenever he came to himself he groped his way a little nearer to France and before he fainted again, registered the direction with two more lumps of earth placed in line.  It took him a day to crawl back.