rather jolly air
of any vigorous organism, going full blast ahead.

We had been through it, seen the wards of strapping, handsome, childlike
Russians, as carefully looked after by the Hungarians as if they were
their own, when our officer guide remarked that in an hour or two a
transport of four hundred new wounded would be coming in. We waited in
the receiving-room, where a young convalescent had been brought out on a
stretcher to see his peasant family--a weather-beaten father, a mother
with a kerchief over her head, two solemn, little, round-faced brothers
with Tyrolean feathers in their caps. Benches were arranged for those
able to sit up, clerks prepared three writing-desks, orderlies laid a
row of stretchers side by side for fifty yards or so along the railroad
track.

The transport was late, the sun going, and I went down to the other end
of the yard to get a picture of some Russians I had seen two days
before. We had walked through their ward then, and I remembered one very
sick boy, to whom one of the nurses with us had given a flower she was
wearing, and how he had smiled as he put it to his face with his gaunt,
white hand. "It doesn't take long," she had said, "when they get like
that. They have so little vitality to go on, and some morning between
two and five"--and sure enough his bed was empty now.

A troop-train was rushing by, as I came back, covered with green
branches and flowers. They went by with a cheer--that cheer which
sounds like a cheer sometimes, and sometimes, when two trains pass on
adjoining tracks so fast that you only catch a blur of faces, like the
windy shriek of lost souls.

Then came a sound of band music, and down the road, outside the high
wire fence, a little procession led by soldiers in gray-blue, playing
Chopin's "Funeral March." Behind them came the hospital hearse, priests,
and a weeping peasant family. The little procession moved slowly behind
the wailing trumpets--it was an honor given to all who died here, except
the enemy--and must have seemed almost a sort of extravagance to the
convalescents crowding up to the fence who had seen scores of their
comrades buried in a common trench. Opposite us the drums rolled and
the band began the Austrian national hymn. Then they stopped; the
soldier escort fired their rules in the air. That ended the ceremony,
and the hearse moved on alone.

Then the convalescents drifted back toward us. Most of them would soon
be ready