“They were the best crews, too. University crews. Of course, our coxswain could see, but the crew were blind. We’ve not only taught them to row, we’ve taught them to support themselves, taught them trades. All men who come here have lost their eyesight in battle in this war, but already we have taught some of them a trade and set them up in business. And while the war lasts business will be good for them. And it must be nursed and made to grow. So we have an ‘after-care’ committee. To care for them after they have left us. To buy raw material, to keep their work up to the mark, to dispose of it. We need money for those men. For the men who have started life again for themselves. Do you think there are people in America who would like to help those men?”

I asked, in case there were such people, to whom should they write.

“To me,” he said, “St. Dunstan’s, Regent’s Park.”[C]

I found the seventeen acres of St. Dunstan’s so arranged that no blind man could possibly lose his way. In the house, over the carpets, were stretched strips of matting. So long as a man kept his feet on matting he knew he was on the right path to the door. Outside the doors hand-rails guided him to the workshops, schoolrooms, exercising-grounds, and kitchen-gardens. Just before he reached any of these places a brass knob on the hand-rail warned him to go slow. Were he walking on the great stone terrace and his foot scraped against a board he knew he was within a yard of a flight of steps. Wherever you went you found men at work, learning a trade, or, having learned one, intent in the joy of creating something. To help them there are nearly sixty ladies, who have mastered the Braille system and come daily to teach it. There are many other volunteers, who take the men on walks around Regent’s Park and who talk and read to them. Everywhere was activity. Everywhere some one was helping some one: the blind teaching the blind; those who had been a week at St. Dunstan’s doing the honors to those just arrived. The place spoke only of hard work, mutual help, and cheerfulness. When first you arrived you thought you had over the others a certain advantage, but when you saw the work the blind men were turning out, which they could not see, and which you knew with both your eyes you never could have turned out, you felt apologetic. There were cabinets, for instance, measured to the twentieth of an inch, and men who were studying to be masseurs who, only by touch, could distinguish all the bones in the body. There was Miss Woods, a blind stenographer. I dictated a sentence to her, and as fast as I spoke she took it down on a machine in the Braille alphabet. It appeared in raised figures on a strip of paper like those that carry stock quotations. Then, reading the sentence with her fingers, she pounded it on an ordinary typewriter. Her work was faultless.

What impressed you was the number of the workers who, over their task, sang or whistled. None of them paid any attention to what the others were whistling. Each acted as though he were shut off in a world of his own. The spirits of the Tommies were unquenchable.

Thorpe Five was one of those privates who are worth more to a company than the sergeant-major. He was a comedian. He looked like John Bunny, and when he laughed he shook all over, and you had to laugh with him, even though you were conscious that Thorpe Five had no eyes and no hands. But was he conscious of that? Apparently not. Was he down-hearted? No! Some one snatched his cigarette; and with the stumps of his arms he promptly beat two innocent comrades over the head. When the lady guide interfered and admitted it was she who had robbed him, Thorpe Five roared in delight.

“I bashed ’em!” he cried. “Her took it, but I bashed the two of ’em!”

A private of the Munsters was weaving a net, and, as though he were quite alone, singing, in a fine barytone, “Tipperary.” If you want to hear real close harmony, you must listen to Southern darkeys; and if you want to get the sweetness and melancholy out of an Irish chant, an Irishman must sing it. I thought I had heard “Tipperary” before several times, and that it was a march. I found I had not heard it before, and that it is not a march, but a lament and a love-song. The soldier did not know we were listening, and while his fingers wove the meshes of the net, his voice rose in tones of the most moving sweetness. He did not know that he was facing a window, he did not know that he was staring straight out upon the city of London. But we knew, and when in his rare barytone and rare brogue he whispered rather than sang the lines:

“Good-by, Piccadilly—
Farewell, Leicester Square,
It’s a long, long way to Tipperary”

—all of his unseen audience hastily fled.