ined from these expressions of pain because
while one man was yelling the other thirteen in the ward were shouting
with glee and chaffing him, and as soon as his wounds had been redressed
he would join in the laughs at the expense of those who followed him.

There was a Jewish boy in the ward and he had a particularly painful
shell wound in his right leg. He was plucky about the painful treatment
and used to say to the doctor, "Don't mind me yelling, doc. I can't help
it, but you just keep right on."

The Jew boy's cry of pain as near as I can reproduce it went something
like this, "Oy! Oy!! Oy!!! YOY!!! Doctor!"

The Jew boy's clear-toned enunciation of this Yiddish lullaby, as the
rest of the ward called it, brought many a heartless, fiendish laugh
from the occupants of the other beds. We almost lost one of our
patients on account of that laugh. He nearly laughed himself to
death--in fact.

This near victim of uncontrollable risibilities was an Italian boy from
the East Side of New York. A piece of shrapnel had penetrated one of his
lungs and pleurisy had developed in the other one. It had become
necessary to operate on one of the lungs and tape it down. The boy had
to do his best to breathe with one lung that was affected by pleurisy.
Every breath was like the stab of a knife and it was quite natural that
the patient would be peevish and garrulous. The whole ward called him
the "dying Wop." But his name was Frank.

When the Jew boy would run the scale with his torture cry, the "dying
Wop" would be forced to forget his laboured breathing and give vent to
laughter. These almost fatal laughs sounded something like this:

"He! Hee!! Hee!!! (on a rising inflection and then much softer) Oh, Oh,
Oh! Stop him, stop him, stop him!" The "He-Hee's" were laughs, but the
"Oh-oh's" were excruciating pain.

Frank grew steadily worse and had to be removed from the ward. Weeks
afterward I went back to see him and found him much thinner and
considerably weaker. He occupied a bed on one of the pavilions in the
garden. He was still breathing out of that one lung and between gasps he
told me that six men had died in the bed next to him. Then he smiled up
at me with a look in his eyes that seemed to say, "But they haven't
croaked the 'dying Wop' yet."

"This here--hospital stuff----" Frank told me slowly, and between gasps,
"is the big fight after all. I know--I am fighting here--against
death--and am going to win out, too.

"I