Rotten luck for him, you might say, but how lucky for me!" Had he been the brother who was shot in both legs he would have treated the matter just as light-heartedly.
One English major, before he reached his own firing-line, was hit by a bursting shell in three places.

While he was lying in the American ambulance hospital at Neuilly the doctor said to him: "This cot next to yours is the only one vacant.

Would you object if we put a German in it ?" "By no means," said the major; "I haven't seen one yet." The stories the English officers told us at La Rue's and Maxim's by contrast with the surroundings were all the more grewsome.

Seeing them there it did not seem possible that in a few hours these same fit, sun-tanned youths in khaki would be back in the trenches, or scouting in advance of them, or that only the day before they had been dodging death and destroying their fellow men.
Maxim's, which now reminds one only of the last act of "The Merry Widow," was the meeting-place for the French and English officers from the front; the American military attaches from our embassy, among whom were soldiers, sailors, aviators, marines; the doctors and volunteer nurses from the American ambulance, and the correspondents who by night dined in Paris and by day dodged arrest and other things on the firing-line, or as near it as they could motor without going to jail.

For these Maxim's was the clearing-house for news of friends and battles.