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A brief description of the Hotel des Invalides, as the institution was called, is desirable, for there can be little doubt that it served as the inspiration, if not the model, for the soldiers' homes that were later established in most civilized countries.

The superannuated and the infirm constituted the majority of the population of the Hotel. On the eve of the Revolution, over a century after its establishment, out of 3,000 inmates, 1,107 were old men between seventy and ninety-two years of age, 1,488 had suffered amputations or were otherwise wounded, decrepit, or infirm, of whom 72 were provided with wooden legs, 62 were one-handed, 4 minus both arms, 203 blind, 2 with silver noses, 129 on crutches, 185 helpless, and 68 idiots.

The house was organized first and foremost for the care of the aged and the sick. More than half the personnel spent all their days in the infirmary, looked after by sisters of charity. A comrade was assigned to each man who was helpless enough to need constant assistance, the former receiving a special allowance for his pains.

The officers ate apart in special dining-rooms; the privates ate in two "shifts" in four great refectories. Food was good and plentiful, including daily portions of meat, bread, and wine. The institution provided uniforms and shoes, and a pittance of fifteen sous a month.

The discipline was military; the Hotel was like a garrison. There were special police, gate-keepers, sentinels. Everything was done to the roll of drums. Severe military rule was supplemented by a moral discipline, which provided for compulsory attendance at Sunday services, and heavy penalties for infractions of the rules against swearing, intoxication, fisticuffs.

Amusements were rather limited, except for card-games and skittles. Some of the inmates worked little gardens. They were all permitted to work in their rooms. The administration even went so far as to provide tools and -- for those who cared to learn -- instruction in a trade. Those who were married, and whose families lived in the neighborhood, were given frequent permission to visit their wives and children; but no one could marry without the consent of the governor.

Certain marks of honor raised the institution above the level of a mere asylum; but personal liberty was greatly reduced, and many were glad to leave after a short stay.

The king was not slow to notice that many of the disabled soldiers could, at a pinch, still render service, notably on garrison duty in frontier strongholds. The Hotel continued to clothe and feed those who were selected for this service, and gave them pay or half-pay. In 1736 there were 141 of these "detached companies." Those who found life in the Invalides too dull asked nothing better than to be assigned to this service.

Gradually the custom grew up of granting three years' leave to those who had families and longed to live with them, during which time the Hotel clothed them and gave them an allowance of at least 100 livres. Soon the three years' leave was extended indefinitely, the allowances automatically becoming pensions. In 1790, in addition to 2,370 disabled men in the institution itself, there were throughout France 26,000 pensioned soldiers.

Thus, the two principles of institutionalism and pensions -- principles ultimately adopted by all the western nations -- came to exist side by side in France, continuing down through the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries. In 1831 the pension system was revised and regulated. The revised law based the pension awards on years of service, on rank attained, and to some slight extent on the seriousness of the disability. This law was still operative when the war of 1914 began.

Today, the Invalides is little more than a magnificent war museum. It did not escape severe criticism even in its palmiest days. Voltaire regarded it as constituting in large measure a source of waste, holding that "the discharged soldier might still labor and follow a trade, and give children to his country." Another French writer, Ardant du Pic, declared: "The Invalides is superb as a bit of apparatus, of ostentation. I wish that the original inspiration had been an impulse of justice, a Christian idea, and not purely one of military policy; nevertheless, the effects are morally disastrous. This assembly of idlers is a school of depravity in which the invalided soldier ultimately forfeits the right to be respected."

The history of the care of the disabled soldier in France is largely typical of the history of this movement in other countries. In most nations, the administrative conscience awoke but tardily to an even approximately adequate sense of its obligations both to society and to the individual disabled in the most perilous of social functions. It will be remembered that in England, toward the dose of the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth took ineffective measures for the relief of hundreds of soldiers who had been invalided home from Flanders. There seems to be no record of further public action until the time of the Commonwealth, when Parliament made more effective provision, both in the form of pension grants and of soldiers' hospitals and homes, but only for those soldiers who had been disabled fighting for Cromwell. Crippled royalists received no consideration. When these partisan provisions were revoked by Charles II on his accession to the throne, the hitherto neglected royalist soldiers took advantage of the opportunity to plead for provision. And in 1662 the king approved a measure enabling discharged soldiers to practise a trade without completing an apprenticeship -- a measure which provided but sorry relief for those most in need of care, the severely disabled.