Under the direction of a doctor each convalescent was working at what his affected muscles most needed or could stand. Those that ran sewing-machines exercised their legs. Those that made toys and cut wood with the electric machines got a certain amount of arm exercise. The sewing-machine experts had already made fifty thousand sacks for sand fortifications and breastworks.
From this enormous Lycée (which cost, I was told, five million francs) we drove to the Salpêtrière, which in the remote ages before the war, was an old people's home. Its extent, comprising, as it does, court after court, gardens, masses of buildings which loom beyond and yet beyond, not only inspired awed reflections of the number of old that must need charity in Paris but made one wonder where they were at the present moment, now that the Salpêtrière had been turned into a hospital. Perhaps, being very old, they had conveniently died.
Here the men made wooden shoes with leather tops for the trenches, cigarette packages, ingenious toys—the airships and motor ambulances were the most striking; baskets, chairs, lace.
The rooms I visited were in charge of an English infirmière and were fairly well aired. Some of the men would soon be well enough to go back to the Front and were merely given occupation during their convalescence. But in the main the object is to prepare the unfortunates known as réformés for the future.
Since the fighting on the Somme began Madame Lyon has gone several times a month to the recaptured towns, in charge of train-loads of installations for the looted homes of the wretched people. In one entire village the Germans had left just one saucepan. Nothing else whatever.