ittle disappointed at the very languid interest that the
history of our adventures roused, but the truth was that the wounded
had begun to arrive in great numbers and there was no time for
travellers' stories.

A dream, I know, yesterday's experiences seemed to me as I settled
down to the business that had filled so much of my earlier period at
the war. Here, with the wounded, I was at home--the bare little room,
the table with the bottles and bandages and scissors, the basins and
dishes, the air ever thicker and thicker with that smell of dried
blood, unwashed bodies, and iodine that is like no other smell in the
world. The room would be crowded, the sanitars supporting legs and
arms and heads, nurses dashing to the table for bandages or iodine or
scissors, three or four stretchers occupying the floor of the room
with the soldiers who were too severely wounded to sit or stand, these
soldiers often utterly quiet, dying perhaps, or watching with eyes
that realised only dreams and shadows, the little window square, the
strip of sky, the changing colours of the day; then the sitting
soldiers, on ordinary of a marvellous and most simple patience,
watching the bandaging of their arms and hands and legs, whispering
sometimes "_Boje moi! Boje moi!_" dragging themselves up from their
desperate struggle for endurance to answer the sanitars who asked
their name, their regiments, the nature of their wounds. Sometimes
they would talk, telling how the thing had happened to them:

"And there, your Honour, before I could move, she had come--such a
noise--eh, eh, a terrible thing--I called out '_Zemliac_. Here it is!'
I said, and he...."

But as a rule they were very quiet, starting perhaps at the sting of
the iodine, asking for a bandage to be tighter or not so tight,
sometimes suddenly slipping in a faint to the ground, and then
apologising afterwards. And in their eyes always that look as though,
very shortly, they would hear some story so marvellous that it would
compensate for all their present pain and distress. There would be the
doctors, generally two at a time--Semyonov, unmoved, rough apparently
in his handling of the men but always accomplishing his work with
marvellous efficiency, abusing the nurses and sanitars without
hesitation if they did not do as he wished, but never raising his soft
ironic voice, his square body of a solidity and composure that nothing
could ruffle, his fair beard, his blue eyes, his spotless line