The French did not go about this in a hole-in-a-corner way in a back street. They did not let the “cash” girl feel her artistic effort was only a blind to help her help others. They held a “salon” for the cockades.
And they held it in the same Palace of Art, where at the annual salon are hung the paintings of the great French artists. The cockades are exhibited in one hall, and next to them is an exhibition of the precious tapestries rescued from the Rheims cathedral.
In the hall beyond that is an exhibition of lace. To this, museums, duchesses, and queens have sent laces that for centuries have been family heirlooms. But the cockades of Mimi Pinson by the thousands and thousands are given just as much space, are arranged with the same taste and by the same artist who grouped and catalogued the queens’ lace handkerchiefs.
And each little Mimi Pinson can go to the palace and point to the cockade she made with her own fingers, or point to the spot where it was, and know she has sent a franc to a soldier of France.
These days the streets of Paris are filled with soldiers, each of whom has given to France some part of his physical self. That his country may endure, that she may continue to enjoy and teach liberty, he has seen his arm or his leg, or both, blown off, or cut off. But when on the boulevards you meet him walking with crutches or with an empty sleeve pinned beneath his Cross of War, and he thinks your glance is one of pity, he resents it. He holds his head more stiffly erect. He seems to say: “I know how greatly you envy me!”
And who would dispute him? Long after the war is ended, so long as he lives, men and women of France will honor him, and in their eyes he will read their thanks. But there is one soldier who cannot read their thanks, who is spared the sight of their pity. He is the one who has made all but the supreme sacrifice. He is the one who is blind. He sits in perpetual darkness. You can remember certain nights that seemed to stretch to doomsday, when sleep was withheld and you tossed and lashed upon the pillow, praying for the dawn. Imagine a night of such torture dragged out over many years, with the dreadful knowledge that the dawn will never come. Imagine Paris with her bridges, palaces, parks, with the Seine, the Tuileries, the boulevards, the glittering shop-windows conveyed to you only through noise. Only through the shrieks of motor-horns and the shuffling of feet.
The men who have been blinded in battle have lost more than sight. They have been robbed of their independence. They feel they are a burden. It is not only the physical loss they suffer, but the thought that no longer are they of use, that they are a care, that in the scheme of things—even in their own little circles of family and friends—there is for them no place. It is not unfair to the poilu to say that the officer who is blinded suffers more than the private. As a rule, he is more highly strung, more widely educated; he has seen more; his experience of the world is broader; he has more to lose. Before the war he may have been a lawyer, doctor, man of many affairs. For him it is harder than, for example, the peasant to accept a future of unending blackness spent in plaiting straw or weaving rag carpets. Under such conditions life no longer tempts him. Instead, death tempts him, and the pistol seems very near at hand.
