his boots. There was another young surgeon, once of Barts',
who made himself the cup-server of the fat knight and kept his wine at
the brim, and encouraged him to fresh audacities of anecdotry, with
a humorous glance at the colonel's troubled face... The colonel was
forgotten after dinner. The little Irish major took the lid off the
boiling pot of mirth. He was entirely mad, as he assured us, between
dances of a wild and primitive type, stories of adventure in far lands,
and spasms of asthmatic coughing, when he beat his breast and said, "A
pox in my bleeding heart!"

Falstaff was playing Juliet to the Romeo of the tall young surgeon,
singing falsetto like a fat German angel dressed in loose-fitting khaki,
with his belt undone. There were charades in the tent. The boy from
Barts' did remarkable imitations of a gamecock challenging a rival bird,
of a cow coming through a gate, of a general addressing his troops
(most comical of all). Several glasses were broken. The corkscrew was
disregarded as a useless implement, and whisky-bottles were decapitated
against the tent poles. I remember vaguely the crowning episode of the
evening when the little major was dancing the Irish jig with a kitchen
chair; when Falstaff was singing the Prologue of Pagliacci to the
stupefied colonel; when the boy, once of Barts', was roaring like a lion
under the mess table, and when the tall, melancholy surgeon was at the
top of the tent pole, scratching himself like a gorilla in his native
haunts... Outside, the field hospital was quiet, under a fleecy sky
with a crescent moon. Through the painted canvas of the tent city
candle-light glowed with a faint rose-colored light, and the Red Cross
hung limp above the camp where many wounded lay, waking or sleeping,
tossing in agony, dying in unconsciousness. Far away over the fields,
rockets were rising above the battle-lines. The sky was flickering with
the flush of gun-fire. A red glare rose and spread below the clouds
where some ammunition-dump had been exploded... Old Falstaff fell asleep
in the car on the way back to our quarters, and I smiled at the memory
of great laughter in the midst of tragedy.

XIV

The struggle of men from one low ridge to another low ridge in a
territory forty miles wide by more than twenty miles deep, during five
months of fighting, was enormous in its intensity and prolongation of
slaughter, wounding, and endurance of all hardships and terrors of war.
As an ey