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!...