And in the streets—­what misery!  The lame, the halt, the maimed.  Men with damaged leg or foot hopping along painfully by the aid of a friendly baton; men nursing broken arms or shattered hands; men with bandaged heads; men being carried from operating shops to cafe floors; men with body wounds lying on stretchers—­all with ragged, blood-bespattered remnants of what once were uniforms.  One sees little of the glory of war in Valievo.  The Servian Medical Staff, deprived on this occasion of outside assistance, and short alike of doctors, surgeons, nurses, and material, is striving heroically to cope with its task.  Where they have been able to equip hospitals the work has been very creditably done.  One building is almost exclusively devoted to cases where amputations have been necessary.  It is clean, orderly, and the patients are obviously well cared for.  Here, when I entered a ward of some thirty beds in which every man lay with a bandaged stump where his leg should be, I think I saw the Servian spirit at its best.  They had been newly operated upon, their sufferings must have been great, and for them all the future is black with forebodings.  There is no patriotic fund in little Servia.  Yet amid all the pain of body and uncertainty of mind that must have been theirs they did not complain.  All they desired to know was whether the Schwaba (Austrians) had been beaten out of Servia.

But it is when one leaves the organized hospitals and wends one’s way through the crowds of wounded who block the pavements, and enters a lower-class cafe, that the appalling tragedy of it all fills even the spectator with a sense of hopelessness.  There, like cattle upon their bed of straw, lie sufferers from all manner of hurts.  They remain mute and uncomplaining, just as they have been dropped down from the incoming oxen transports.  Their wounds—­three, four, or five days old—­have yet received no attention save the primitive first-aid of the battlefield.  Blood poisoning is setting in; limbs that prompt dressing would have saved are fast becoming victims for the surgeon’s knife.  Most of them know the risk they run, for this is their third war—­often, too, their third wound—­in two short years.  Yet the doctors cannot come, because every man of them is already doing more than human energy allows.  It is a heartrending sight to look down upon this helpless mass and to realize that many of them have been sentenced to painful death for mere lack of primitive medical attention.

One wonders whether, now that half Europe has been transformed into a vast slaughterhouse, appeals for sympathy can be other than in vain.

ANOTHER “HAPPY THOUGHT."

By WINIFRED ARNOLD.

The world is so full
  Of a number of Kings!—­
That’s probably what is the
  Matter with things.

Spy Organization in England

British Home Office Communication, Oct. 9.