lines of the allies with tubercular bacteria. We asked French and
American and British doctors about that story, and they all answered
that there was nothing to it. The doctors told us that the Germans
have a cheaper and better way to fill France with tuberculosis
than by wasting serum on their enemies. And then, one day in a
tuberculosis hospital we picked up this story, which explained what
the doctors meant.

We met a young man from Lille. It was his birthday; Henry bought
him a bouquet. He told us his story. He said:

"Three years ago when the war broke out I was 19 years old and was
living in Lille with my parents. The Germans came to our house one
day with their guns and took me away. They took me to a town in
Germany; I think it was Essen, where they made me work in an iron
or steel mill. I worked fourteen hours a day, slept on straw outside
the works in a shed, had only the clothes they took me in and had
only bran to eat!"

"Only bran?" we asked, doubting it.

"Only bran," the interpreter repeated, and from half a dozen
cots near by, where others who had suffered as he had, heard our
question, came the echo of his confirmation, "Only bran to eat!"
He soon caught cold, and soon the "cold" became tuberculosis, and
after three years of this his sick days exceeded his work days, and
in due course he and five hundred others were assembled, put on a
train and shipped out of Germany through Switzerland to Evian in
France. Three hundred thousand of these poor husks, men, women,
and children, have been dumped into France in the last seven months.