n and pursued, and always with us that harassing
fear that we had now no ground upon which we might rest our feet, that
nothing in the world belonged to us, that we were fugitives and
vagabonds by the will of God.

As our carriage stopped before the door of the large white building in
X---- that seemed just like the large white building in O----, the
little officer was again at our side.

"I've got contusion ..." he said. "I'm very unhappy, and I don't know
where to go."

Trenchard felt now as though in another moment he would tumble back
again into his nightmare of yesterday. The house at X---- indeed was
fantastic enough. I feel that I am in danger of giving too many
descriptions of our various halting-places. For the most part they
largely resembled one another, large deserted country houses with
broken windows, bare walls and floors, a tangled garden and a tattered
collection of books in the Polish language. But this building at X----
was like no other of our asylums.

It was a huge place, a strange combination of the local town-hall and
the local theatre. It was the theatre that at that early hour in the
morning seemed to our weary eyes so fantastic. As we peered into it it
was a huge place, already filled with wounded and lighted only by
candles, stuck here and there in bottles. I could see, dimly, the
stage at the back of the room, and still hanging, tattered and
restless in the draught, a forgotten backcloth of some old play. I
could see that it was a picture of a gay scene in an impossibly highly
coloured town--high marble stairs down which flower-girls with swollen
legs came tripping into a market-place filled with soldiers and their
lovers--"Carmen" perhaps. It seemed absurd enough there in the
uncertain candlelight with the wounded groaning and crying in front of
it. There was already in the air that familiar smell of blood and
iodine, the familiar cries of: "Oh, _Sestritza_--Oh, _Sestritza_!" the
familiar patient faces of the soldiers, sitting up, waiting for their
turn, the familiar sharp voice of the sanitar: "What Division? What
regiment? bullet or shrapnel?"

I remember that some wounded man, in high fever, was singing, and that
no one could stop him.

"He's dead," I heard Semyonov's curt voice behind me, and turning saw
them cover the body on the stretcher with a sheet.

"Oh! Oh!... Oh! Oh!" shrieked a man from the middle of whose back
Nikitin, probing with his finger, was extracting a bullet.