“Where is he?” asked the German.

“Yonder,” she said, indicating a bundled-up figure on a pallet near the door.  A drawn, hopeless face of a half-grown boy showed from the huddle of blankets.  The surgeon-general cast a quick look at the swathed form and then spoke in an undertone to a French regimental surgeon on duty in the room.  Together the two approached the lad.

“My son,” said the German to him in French, “I am told you do not feel so well to-day.”

The boy-soldier whispered an answer and waggled his head despondently.  The German put his hand on the youth’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 high sloped ceiling and glass front, the place made a first-rate hospital.