him from choking to death the attendants had tied him in a half
erect posture. A sort of hammock-like sling passed under his arms, and
a rope ran from it to a hook in a wall and was knotted fast to the hook.
He swung there, neither sitting nor lying, fighting for the breath of
life, with an unspeakable misery looking out from his eyes; and he was
too far spent to lift a hand to brush away the flies that swarmed upon
his face and his lips and upon his bare, throbbing throat. The flies
dappled the faces of his fellow sufferers with loathsome black dots;
they literally masked his. I preserve a memory which is just as vivid
of certain things I saw in a big institution in Laon. Although in
German hands, and nominally under German control, the building was given
over entirely to crippled and ailing French prisoners. These patients
were minded and fed by their own people and attended by captured French
surgeons. In our tour of the place I saw only two men wearing the
German gray. One was the armed sentry who stood at the gate to see that
no recovering inmate slipped out, and the other was a German surgeon-
general who was making his daily round of inspection of the hospitals
and had brought us along with him. Of the native contingent the person
who appeared to be in direct charge was a handsome, elderly lady,
tenderly solicitous of the frowziest Turco in the wards and exquisitely
polite, with a frozen politeness, to the German officer. When he
saluted her she bowed to him deeply and ceremoniously and silently. I
never thought until then that a bow could be so profoundly executed and
yet so icily cold. It was a lesson in congealed manners.

As we were leaving the room a nun serving as a nurse hailed the German
and told him one of her charges was threatening to die, not because of
his wound, but because he had lost heart and believed himself to be
dying.

"Where is he?" asked the German.

"Yonder," she said, indicating a bundled-up figure on a pallet near the
door. A drawn, hopeless face of a half-grown boy showed from the huddle
of blankets. The surgeon-general cast a quick look at the swathed form
and then spoke in an undertone to a French regimental surgeon on duty in
the room. Together the two approached the lad.

"My son," said the German to him in French, "I am told you do not feel
so well to-day."

The boy-soldier whispered an answer and waggled his head despondently.
The German put his hand on the youth