Page:Women Wanted.djvu/317

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WOMEN WANTED
289

smashing. Nothing about here was broken but men—and women were mending them!

At length they had the sergeant patched up as well as they could. He would never again work at his skilled trade. But they pinned a medal for valour on his coat lapel. And they sent him back to his wife in the north of England. The woman who met him at the door fell on her knees: "My dear, my dear!" She gathered him from a wheel chair into her arms with a sob. The man who had gone out in khaki was home again.

"Mustered out of the service," his papers read. But his wife will never be!

Mustered out of service. So was the man with the twisted face, who never again can smile. And so was the man with the blinded eyes, whose little daughter on sunny days leads him to the Green Park where he sits on a bench and talks to the squirrels. Just so I have seen him sitting in the Gardens of the Tuileries. Just so he sits in the Tiergarten by the side of the River Spree. He is going to be "re-educated" to keep chickens. And Sergeant Jones shall learn basket weaving for a living! Oh, and there are thousands of others!

After each great drive on the front, they are passing through the hospitals to the cottage rose bowered and red roofed, to the blue trimmed cottage and the ikon blessed cottage. And now they are waited for in plain little white houses where a woman on the front porch shades her eyes with her hand to look down Main Street as far as she can see. And it