A flag drooped as if wilted from the top of a tall pole standing on the side of the parade-ground opposite her.

Languidly pacing in front of the Colonel's tent was an Orderly, who had been selected in the morning for his spruce neatness, but who now looked like some enormous blue vegetable, rapidly withering under the sun's blistering rays.
Beyond were the barracks, baking and sweltering, cracking their rough, unpainted sides into yawning fissures, and filling the smothering air with resinous odors distilled from the fat knots in the refuse planking of which they were built.

Beyond these was the line of camp-guards--bright gun-barrels and bayonets glistening painfully, and those who bore them walking with as weary slowness as was consistent with any motion whatever, along their beats.
On straw in the oven-like barracks, and under the few trees in the camp-ground, lay the flushed and panting soldiers, waiting wearily for that relief which the descending sun would bring.
The hospital to which Rachel had been brought differed from the rest of the sheds in the camp by being whitewashed within and without, which made it radiate a still more unendurable heat than its duller-lustered companions.

A powerful odor of chloride of lime and carbolic acid shocked her sensitive nostrils with their tales of all the repulsiveness those disinfectants were intended to destroy or hide.
Several dejected, hollow-eyed convalescents, whose uniforms hung about their wasted bodies as they would about wooden crosses, sat on benches in the scanty shade by one side of the building, and fanned themselves weakly with fans clumsily fashioned from old newspapers.

They looked up as the trim, lady-like figure stepped lightly down from the ambulance, and the long-absent luster returned briefly to their sad eyes.
"That looks like home, Jim," said one of the fever-wasted.
"That it does.