battle-fields and captured cities, not as mere outsiders, picked up from a hotel and presently to be dropped there again, but as, in a sense, a part of the army itself.  They had their commandant to report to, their “camp” and “uniform”—­the gold-and-black Presse-Quartier arm band—­and when they had finished one excursion they returned to headquarters with the reasonable certainty that in another ten days or so they would start out again.

Chapter XIV

Cannon Fodder

At the head of each iron bed hung the nurse’s chart and a few words of “history.”  These histories had been taken down as the wounded came in, after their muddy uniforms had been removed, they had been bathed, and could sink, at last, into the blessed peace and cleanness of the hospital bed.  And through them, as through the large end of a telescope, one looked across the hot summer and the Hungarian fields, now dusty and yellow, to the winter fighting and freezing in the Carpathians.

“Possibly,” the doctor said, “you would like to see one of these cases.”  The young fellow was scarce twenty, a strapping boy with fine teeth and intelligent eyes.  He looked quite well; you could imagine him pitching hay or dancing the czardas, with his hands on his girl’s waist and her hands on his, as these Hungarian peasants dance, round and round, for hours together.  But he would not dance again, as both his feet had been amputated at the ankle and it was from the stumps that the doctor was unwrapping the bandages.  The history read:  While doing sentry duty on the mountains on March 28, we were left twenty-four hours without being relieved and during that time my feet were frozen.

The doctor spoke with professional briskness.  He himself would not have tried to save any of the foot—­better amputate at once at the line of demarcation, get a good flap of healthy tissue and make a proper stump.  “That scar tissue’ll never heal—­it’ll always be tender and break when he tries to use it; he has been here four months now, and you can see how tender it is.”

The boy scowled and grinned as the doctor touched the scar.  For our English and those things under the sheet he seemed to have much the same feeling of strangeness:  both were something foreign, rather uncomfortable.  He looked relieved when the bandages were on again and the white sheet drawn up.  “We had dozens of them during the winter—­one hundred and sixty-three frozen feet and one hundred frozen hands in this hospital alone.  They had to be driven back from the front in carts, for days sometimes.  When they got here their feet were black—­literally rotting away.  Nothing to do but let the flesh slough off and then amputate.”

We strolled on down the sunny, clean-smelling wards.  The windows were open.  They were playing tennis in the yard below; on a bench under a tree a young Hungarian soldier, one arm in a sling, and a girl were reading the same book.  Sunday is a very genial day in Budapest.  The cafe tables are crowded, orchestras playing everywhere, and in dozens of pavilions and on the grass and gravel outside them peasants and the humbler sort of people are dancing.  The Danube—­beautiful if not blue —­flows through the town.