at any rate, and
when one of the Hungarians brought him a big tin cup of coffee and a
chunk of black bread, he wriggled himself half upright and went to work
at it like a veteran.

As soon as the men were registered they were hurried out of their
uniforms and into the bathroom. At the door two nurses in white--so
calm and clean and strong that they must have seemed like goddesses, in
that reek of steam and disinfectants and festering wounds--received
them, asked each man how he was wounded, and quickly, as if he were a
child, snipped off his bandages, unless the leg or arm were in a cast,
and turned him over to the orderlies. Those who could walk used
showers, the others were bathed on inclined slabs. Even the worst
wounded scarcely made a sound, and those who could take care of
themselves limped under the showers as if they had been hospital
boarders before, and waited for, and even demanded, with a certain
peremptoriness, their little bundle of belongings before they went on to
the dressing-room.

Discipline, possibly, though one could easily fancy that all this
organized kindness and comfort suddenly enveloping them was enough to
raise them for the moment above thoughts of pain.

As they lifted the man on the dressing-table and loosened the
pillow-like bandage under his drawn-up thigh, a thick, sickening odor
spread through the room. As the last bit of gauze packing was drawn
from the wound, the greenish pus followed and streamed into the pan.
The jagged chunk of shell had hit him at the top of the thigh and
ploughed down to the knee. The wound had become infected, and the
connecting tissues had rotted away until the leg was now scarcely more
than a bone and the two flaps of flesh. The civilian thinks of a wound,
generally, as a comparatively decent sort of hole, more or less the
width of the bullet itself. There was nothing decent about this wound.
It was such a slash as one might expect in a slaughtered ox. It had
been slit farther to clean the infection, until you could have thrust
your fist into it, and, as the surgeon worked, the leg, partly from
weakness, partly from the man's nervousness, trembled like a leaf.

First the gauze stuffed into the cavity had to be pulled out. The man,
of an age that suggested that he might have left at home a peasant wife,
slightly faded and weather-worn like himself, cringed and dug his nails
into the under side of the table, but made no outcry. The surgeon
squeeze