traw mattresses, for little Servia, worn out by two hard wars, is
ill-equipped to resist the onslaught of a great power. For 16 days a
fierce battle has been raging near the frontier, and wounded have been
pouring in much more rapidly than accommodation can be found for them.

And in the streets--what misery! The lame, the halt, the maimed. Men
with damaged leg or foot hopping along painfully by the aid of a
friendly baton; men nursing broken arms or shattered hands; men with
bandaged heads; men being carried from operating shops to cafe floors;
men with body wounds lying on stretchers--all with ragged,
blood-bespattered remnants of what once were uniforms. One sees little
of the glory of war in Valievo. The Servian Medical Staff, deprived on
this occasion of outside assistance, and short alike of doctors,
surgeons, nurses, and material, is striving heroically to cope with its
task. Where they have been able to equip hospitals the work has been
very creditably done. One building is almost exclusively devoted to
cases where amputations have been necessary. It is clean, orderly, and
the patients are obviously well cared for. Here, when I entered a ward
of some thirty beds in which every man lay with a bandaged stump where
his leg should be, I think I saw the Servian spirit at its best. They
had been newly operated upon, their sufferings must have been great, and
for them all the future is black with forebodings. There is no patriotic
fund in little Servia. Yet amid all the pain of body and uncertainty of
mind that must have been theirs they did not complain. All they desired
to know was whether the Schwaba (Austrians) had been beaten out of
Servia.

But it is when one leaves the organized hospitals and wends one's way
through the crowds of wounded who block the pavements, and enters a
lower-class cafe, that the appalling tragedy of it all fills even the
spectator with a sense of hopelessness. There, like cattle upon their
bed of straw, lie sufferers from all manner of hurts. They remain mute
and uncomplaining, just as they have been dropped down from the incoming
oxen transports. Their wounds--three, four, or five days old--have yet
received no attention save the primitive first-aid of the battlefield.
Blood poisoning is setting in; limbs that prompt dressing would have
saved are fast becoming victims for the surgeon's knife. Most of them
know the risk they run, for this is their third war--often, too, their
third wound-