for them to live
in. There they could sit in the sun and learn to walk on their
artificial legs--it was a sort of school for them.

I went to see it next morning--this Garden of Legless Men. They were
scattered about under the trees on benches two by two, some with
bandaged stumps, some with crutches, some with no legs at all. They
hobbled over willingly enough to have their pictures taken, although one
of them muttered that he had had his taken seventy times and no one had
sent him a. copy yet. The matron gathered them about her, arranging
them rather proudly so that their wounds "would show. One looked to be
quite all right--because he had artificial legs, boots and all, below
the knee.

"Come," said the matron, "show the gentleman how you can walk." And the
obedient man came wabbling toward us in a curious, slightly rickety
progress, like one of those toys which are wound up and set going on the
sidewalk. At the matron's suggestion he even dropped one of his canes.
He could almost stand alone, indeed, like some of the political
arguments for which millions of healthy young fellows like him
obediently go out to fight.

The Augusta Barracken Hospital is on the outskirts of Budapest--a
characteristic product of the war, wholesale healing for wholesale
maiming--1,000 beds and all the essentials, in what, two months before,
was a vacant lot by the railroad tracks. The buildings are long,
one-story, pine barracks, just wide enough for two rows of beds with an
aisle down the centre. The space between the barracks is filled, in
thrifty European fashion, with vegetable-gardens, and they are set on
neat streets through which the patients can be wheeled or carried to and
from the operating and dressing rooms without going up or down stairs.
Trains come in from the observation hospitals near the front, where all
wounded now stay for five days until it is certain they have no
contagious disease, and switch right up to the door of the
receiving-room.

The men give their names, pass at once to another room where their
uniforms are taken away to be disinfected, thence to the bathroom, then
into clean clothes and to bed. It is a city of the sick--of healing,
rather--and on a bright day, with crowds of convalescents sitting about
in their linen pajamas in the sun, stretcher-bearers going back and
forth, the capable-looking surgeons with their strong, kind faces,
pretty nurses in nun-like white, it all has the brisk,