What does the narrator say about the machines at the hospital?

The narrator of Hemingway's short story "In Another Country" has been wounded in World War I and is recuperating at a hospital in Milan. Hemingway himself was wounded in the war as he served as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross. The narrator is rehabilitating on new machines which the doctor guarantees will allow the narrator to once again play football. Every day he works on the machines next to an Italian major, who...

The narrator of Hemingway's short story "In Another Country" has been wounded in World War I and is recuperating at a hospital in Milan. Hemingway himself was wounded in the war as he served as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross. The narrator is rehabilitating on new machines which the doctor guarantees will allow the narrator to once again play football. Every day he works on the machines next to an Italian major, who has a terrible hand injury which has rendered his hand small and withered. The doctor shows the men before and after photographs of another injured hand. Hemingway writes, 

The doctor went into his office in a back room and brought a photograph which showed a hand that had been withered almost as small as the major's, before it had taken a machine course, and after was a little larger.

Later in the story the narrator reports that photographs appear on the walls near the machines which show perfectly regenerated limbs that have been restored by using the machines. Next to the major's machine there are "three photographs of hands like his that were completely restored." The narrator finds it odd that there should be so many photographs since he believed that he and the other men were the first to use the machines. The narrator concludes that the pictures made no difference to the major who had recently lost his wife to pneumonia. Once a great fencer, the major scoffs at the machines, thinking they are virtually worthless:

The major came very regularly to the hospital. I do not think he ever missed a day, although I am sure he did not believe in the machines. There was a time when none of us believed in the machines, and one day the major said it was all nonsense. The machines were new then and it was we who were to prove them. It was an idiotic idea, he said, "a theory, like another."

The photographs made no difference to the other men either who knew they would never be the same as they had been before the war.