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Some of the societies organized in Paris to render aid to the returned soldiers have acquired a nation-wide membership and through powerful public appeals have been able to raise large sums for their purpose. Part of their resources have been devoted to establishing employment agencies and to furnishing better artificial limbs, but more and more of their energies are being turned toward providing opportunities for re-education. This they have done in general through financial aid to schools started by others, though wherever they have perceived the need they have created new schools. They have also placed large numbers of men as apprentices with private employers.

An interest in the future of French industry, joined to an earnest desire to help the glorious mutiles, has influenced other groups to take up the work of refitting injured men to be productive wage-earners. Those trade unions which already possessed facilities for training apprentices in their craft have opened the doors of their schools to returned soldiers, while others have organized teaching workrooms and conduct large classes of the disabled. Employers large and small have shown their eagerness to cooperate in this work. Many have opened their shops to learners on favorable terms, and others have formed schools in which they provide instruction in the various trades used in their shops. The national schools which before the war gave special training in business, the skilled crafts, or agriculture have organized new courses for the disabled. These courses are shorter and necessarily less complete than the regular courses for young apprentices, but they enable disabled men to acquire sufficient working knowledge of the trade to obtain employment in it.

Since a majority of the wounded poilus are peasants whose homes are in tiny villages far from factories and shops, it has been necessary for most of the schools to teach simple village trades. The movement cityward has to be combated in France for the sake of the nation's future prosperity, and schools have therefore had to guard against teaching trades which would take men away from their homes on the land and concentrate them in industrial centers. The peasant who can no longer follow the plow or swing the scythe must not be uprooted from his old surroundings, but must be taught a trade in which he can earn a living for himself and his family in the old neighborhood. Almost every French village can use a tailor or a shoemaker, usually a saddler and harness-maker, too, and a basket-maker who can supply the particular kind of container used for the local products. There are also always pots and pans to be mended -- a tinsmith is needed for that -- and there are countless calls for a carpenter. These then are the trades most frequently taught in the provincial schools. Of them all the most popular with the men is shoe-making. In practically every school throughout the country one finds more pupils in the shoemaking section than in any other manual trade. In explanation of this fact one of the most successful re-educators in France has written that the men are attracted by the prospect of being able to set up their shop in their own house, so that between nailing on new soles they can run out and hoe their potatoes or cultivate a few grapes. In many parts of the country where the peasants wear wooden sabots or the clogs with wooden soles and cloth uppers known as galoches, sabot and galoche-making share the honors with shoemaking. Tailoring does not attract the returned soldier, and though there is a demand for good workmen in the trade many schools are giving up their classes. All of these trades with the exception of carpentry have been found within the capacities of men with leg amputations and have in some instances been mastered by men with lesser arm injuries. A carpenter with a leg amputated can do bench work but cannot mount scaffoldings. Since carpentry is, however, always an arduous trade and beyond the strength of many wounded men, it has been replaced in many schools by cabinet-making.

Favorite courses with men who wish to practise a trade in the city are those which make them mechanics and machinists. Peasants with a mechanical turn have opportunities to become farm mechanics, or men qualified to operate and repair tractors and other agricultural machinery. In the old days there would have been little enough demand in the French countryside for skill of this sort, but the war has changed all things, even the unchanging methods of the French farmer, and now in an effort to replace the labor of the peasant lads who have died on the battle line, an increasing number of tractors are being imported from America and put to work upon the fallow fields. The schools teach men not only to operate them but also to repair them and even to replace parts upon the forge or lathe, for many machines will go into remote districts where they have never been seen before.

A large number of men who before the war worked in the wood, leather, or metal trades are being trained to make artificial limbs. This is a growing industry in France, and the need for skilled workmen is acute. Two good hands are as a rule required for it, but the loss of a leg need not be a handicap. Indeed, it may even be an asset, for who is so well fitted to improve old models or to make new inventions as the man who is conscious of the defects of his own artificial leg? Disabled French soldiers working in school shops have devised many useful appliances and are now turning out large quantities of limbs for their wounded comrades.