's forehead.

"My son," he said, "listen to me. You are not going to die--I promise
you that you shall not die. My colleague here"--he indicated the French
doctor--"stands ready to make you the same promise. If you won't
believe a German, surely you will take your own countryman's
professional word for it," and he smiled a little smile under his gray
mustache. "Between us we are going to make you well and send you, when
this war is over, back to your mother. But you must help us; you must
help us by being brave and confident. Is it not so, doctor?" he added,
again addressing the French physician, and the Frenchman nodded to show
it was so and sat down alongside the youngster to comfort him further.

As we left the room the German surgeon turned, and looking round I saw
that once again he saluted the patrician French lady, and this time as
she bowed the ice was all melted from her bearing. She must have
witnessed the little byplay; perhaps she had a son of her own in
service. There were mighty few mothers in France last fall who did not
have sons in service.

Yet one of the few really humorous recollections of this war that I
preserve had to do with a hospital too; but this hospital was in England
and we visited it on our way home to America. We went--two of us--in
the company of Lord Northcliffe, down into Surrey, to spend a day with
old Lord Roberts. Within three weeks thereafter Lord Roberts was dead
where no doubt he would have willed to die--at the front in France, with
the sound of the guns in his ears, guarded in his last moments by the
Ghurkas and the Sikhs of his beloved Indian contingent. But on this day
of our visit to him we found him a hale, kindly gentleman of eighty-two
who showed us his marvelous collection of firearms and Oriental relics
and the field guns, all historic guns by the way, which he kept upon the
terraces of his mansion house, and who told us, among other things, that
in his opinion our own Stonewall Jackson was perhaps the greatest
natural military genius the world had ever produced. Leaving his house
we stopped, on our return to London, at a hospital for soldiers in the
grounds of Ascot Race Course scarcely two miles from Lord Roberts'
place. The refreshment booths and the other rooms at the back and
underside of the five-shilling stand had been thrown together, except
the barber's shop, which was being converted into an operating chamber;
and, what with its tiled walls and