Discipline, possibly, though one could easily fancy that all this organized kindness and comfort suddenly enveloping them was enough to raise them for the moment above thoughts of pain.

As they lifted the man on the dressing-table and loosened the pillow-like bandage under his drawn-up thigh, a thick, sickening odor spread through the room.  As the last bit of gauze packing was drawn from the wound, the greenish pus followed and streamed into the pan.  The jagged chunk of shell had hit him at the top of the thigh and ploughed down to the knee.  The wound had become infected, and the connecting tissues had rotted away until the leg was now scarcely more than a bone and the two flaps of flesh.  The civilian thinks of a wound, generally, as a comparatively decent sort of hole, more or less the width of the bullet itself.  There was nothing decent about this wound.  It was such a slash as one might expect in a slaughtered ox.  It had been slit farther to clean the infection, until you could have thrust your fist into it, and, as the surgeon worked, the leg, partly from weakness, partly from the man’s nervousness, trembled like a leaf.

First the gauze stuffed into the cavity had to be pulled out.  The man, of an age that suggested that he might have left at home a peasant wife, slightly faded and weather-worn like himself, cringed and dug his nails into the under side of the table, but made no outcry.  The surgeon squeezed the flesh above and about the wound, the quick-fingered young nurse flushed the cavity with an antiseptic wash, then clean, dry gauze was pushed into it and slowly pulled out again.

The man—­they had nicknamed him “Pop”—­breathed faster.  This panting went into a moan, which deepened into a hoarse cry, and then, as he lost hold of himself completely, he began a hideous sort of sharp yelping like a dog.

This is a part of war that doctors and nurses see; not rarely and in one hospital, but in all hospitals and every morning, when the long line of men—­’"pus tanks’ we called ’em last winter,” muttered one of the young doctors—­are brought in to be dressed, There was such a leg that day in the Barracken Hospital; the case described here was in the American Red Cross Hospital in Vienna.

Such individual suffering makes no right or wrong, of course.  It is a part of war.  Yet the more one sees of it and of this cannon fodder, the people on whom the burden of war really falls, how alike they all are in their courage, simplicity, patience, and long-suffering, whether Hungarians or Russians, Belgians or Turks, the less simple is it to be convinced of the complete righteousness of any of the various general ideas in whose name these men are tortured.  I suspect that only those can hate with entire satisfaction and success who stay quietly at home and read the papers.