With the French in France and Salonika

by Richard Harding Davis

All over France, on Christmas Day and the day after, money was collected to send comforts and things good to eat to the men at the front.

It was to save men of the officer class from despair and from suicide, to make them know that for them there still was a life of usefulness, work, and accomplishment, that there was organized in France the Committee for Men Blinded in Battle. The idea was to bring back to officers who had lost their sight, courage, hope, and a sense of independence, to give them work not merely mechanical but more in keeping with their education and intelligence. The President of France is patron of the society, and on its committees in Paris and New York are many distinguished names. The French Government has promised a house near Paris where the blind soldiers may be educated. When I saw them they were in temporary quarters in the Hôtel de Crillon, lent to them by the proprietor. They had been gathered from hospitals in different parts of France by Miss Winifred Holt, who for years has been working for the blind in her Lighthouse in New York. She is assisted in the work in Paris by Mrs. Peter Cooper Hewitt. The officers were brought to the Crillon by French ladies, whose duty it was to guide them through the streets. Some of them also were their instructors, and in order to teach them to read and write with their fingers had themselves learned the Braille alphabet. This requires weeks of very close and patient study. And no nurse’s uniform goes with it. But the reward was great.

It was evident in the alert and eager interest of the men who, perhaps, only a week before had wished to “curse God, and die.” But since then hope had returned to each of them, and he had found a door open, and a new life.

And he was facing it with the same or with even a greater courage than that with which he had led his men into the battle that blinded him. Some of the officers were modelling in clay, others were learning typewriting, one with a drawing-board was studying to be an architect, others were pressing their finger-tips over the raised letters of the Braille alphabet.

Opposite each officer, on the other side of the table, sat a woman he could not see. She might be young and beautiful, as many of them were. She might be white-haired and a great lady bearing an ancient title, from the faubourg across the bridges, but he heard only a voice.

The voice encouraged his progress, or corrected his mistakes, and a hand, detached and descending from nowhere, guided his hand, gently, as one guides the fingers of a child. The officer was again a child. In life for the second time he was beginning with A, B, and C. The officer was tall, handsome, and deeply sunburned. In his uniform of a chasseur d’Afrique he was a splendid figure. On his chest were the medals of the campaigns in Morocco and Algiers, and the crimson ribbon of the Legion of Honor. The officer placed his forefinger on a card covered with raised hieroglyphics.

“N,” he announced.

“No,” the voice answered him.

“M?” His tone did not carry conviction.