wooden table
which had just been vacated and indicated that he wanted relief for his
leg--which leg, I recall, was incased in a rude, splintlike arrangement
of plaited straw. The surgeon took off the straw and the packing
beneath it. The giant had a hole right through his knee, from side to
side, and the flesh all about it was horribly swollen and purplish-
black. So the surgeon soused the joint, wound and all, with iodine; the
youth meanwhile staring blandly up at the ceiling with his arms crossed
on his wide breast. I stood right by him, looking into his face, and he
didn't so much as bat an eyelid. But he didn't offer to get up when the
surgeon was done with treating him. He turned laboriously over on his
face, pulling his shirt free from his body as he did so, and then we saw
that he had a long, infected gash from a glancing bullet across the
small of his back. He had been lying on one angry wound while the other
was redressed. You marveled, not that he had endured it without
blenching, but that he had endured it at all.

The train stayed with us perhaps half an hour, and in that half hour at
least a hundred men must have had treatment of sorts. A signal sounded
and the orderlies lifted up the few wasted specters who still remained
and toted them out. Almost the last man to be borne away was injured in
both legs; an orderly carried him in his arms. Seeing the need of haste
the orderly sought to heave his burden aboard the nearest car. The men
in that car protested; already their space was overcrowded. So the
patient orderly staggered down the train until he found the crippled
soldier's rightful place and thrust him into the straw just as the
wheels began to turn. As the cars, gathering speed, rolled by us we
could see that nearly all the travelers were feeding themselves from
pannikins of the bull-meat stew. Wrappings on their hands and sometimes
about their faces made them doubly awkward, and the hot tallowy mess
spilt in spattering streams upon them and upon the straw under them.

They were on their way. At the end of another twenty-four hour stretch
they might have traveled fifty or sixty or even seventy miles. The
place they left behind them was in worse case than before. Grease
spattered the earth; the floor of the buffet room was ankle deep,
literally, in discarded bandages and blood-stiffened cotton; and the
nurses and the doctors and the helpers dropped down in the midst of it
all to snatch