“We called that man ‘professor,’” said the nurse.  “He was a teacher of some sort.  There was a boy here at the same time, a Pole, but he could speak English:  just out of the university—­Cracow, I think.  He was in Serbia, and was shot through the temple; he lost the sight of both eyes.”

Several in the Serbian fighting had struck river mines.  One, who had been ordered to proceed across the River Save near Sabac, remarked that he was “told afterward” they had struck a floating mine and that seven were killed and thirteen wounded.  The Serbian campaign was not pleasant.  The Serbians do not hold up their hands, as the big, childlike Russians sometimes seem to have done.  They fight as long as they can stand.  Then there was disease and lack of medical supplies and service. ’"They came in covered with mud and with fractures done up with twigs—­just as they had been dressed on the field.  Sometimes a fractured hip would be bound with a good-sized limb from a tree reaching all the way from the man’s feet to his waist.”

Yet the wonder is what nature and the tough constitutions of these young men will do with intelligent help.  We came to what they call a “face case.”  “Wounded November 4 in Galicia by rifle-fire on right side of face and right hand; dressed by comrade, then lost consciousness until arrived here. (’He probably means,’ explained the nurse, ’that he was delirious and didn’t realize the time.’) Physical examination—­right side of face blown away; lower jaw broken into several pieces, extending to left side; teeth on lower jaw loose; part of upper jaw gone, and tongue exposed.  Infected.  Operated—­several pieces of lower jaw removed and two pieces wired together in front.”

From the desk drawer the nurse picked out several photographs—­X-ray pictures of little round shrapnel bullets embedded in flesh, of bone splintered by rifle-bullets and shot through the surrounding flesh as if they had been exploded; one or two black feet cut off above the ankles; one of a group of convalescents standing on the hospital steps.

“There he is,” she said, pointing-to a man with a slightly crooked jaw—­ the man whose history we had just read.  “We saved it.  It isn’t such a bad face, after all.”

The worst wounds, of course, do not come to a hospital so far from the front as this—­they never leave the battle-field at all.  In Turkey, for instance, where travelling is difficult, very few of those shot through the trunk of the body ever got as far as Constantinople—­nearly all of the patients were wounded in the head, arms, or legs.  On over a thousand patients in this Budapest hospital the following statistics are based:  Rifle wounds, 1,095; shrapnel, 138; shell, 2; bayonet, 2; sabre, 1; hand-grenade, 1; frozen feet, 163; frozen hands, 100; rheumatism, 65; typhoid, 38; pneumonia, 15; tetanus, 5; gas infection, 5.  Deaths, 19—­ septicemia, 7; pneumonia, tetanus, typhoid, 1.  It was dark when I started down-stairs, through that warm, brooding stillness of a hospital at night.  The ward at the head of the stairs was hushed now, and the hall lamp, shining across the white trousers of an orderly dozing in his chair within the shadow of the door and past the screen drawn in front of it, dimly lit the foot of the line of beds where the men lay sleeping.