They sat all afternoon hand-in-hand, saying at intervals, “Dgonn Oolie,” and chuckling.

Jan once had brought back from a spring visit to Kragujevatz some horrible sun hats.

They were the cast-off eccentricities of the fashions of six years ago, and had drifted from the Rue de la Paix to this obscure Serbian shop which was selling them as serious articles of clothing.  Jo tried them on, and one of the nurses became so weak with laughter that she tumbled all the way downstairs.

Finding them quite impossible, Jo bequeathed them to the ward, where they were snapped up enthusiastically.

The ugliest was an immense sailor hat, the crown nearly as wide as the brim, but the head hole would have fitted a doll.  However, John Willie fancied that hat and was always to be seen, a tiny, round-backed figure, wandering slowly in a long blue dressing-gown, blue woolly boots, and the enormous hat perched on the top of his pathetically drooping head.

One day poor little John Willie became fearfully ill.  His parents arrived and sat dumbly gazing at him for two nights, while he panted his poor little life away.  His friend the Velika Dete (big child), once a fierce comitaj, was moved away from the “Malo Dete,” to make more room, and he sulked, while the Austrian prisoner orderlies ran to and fro with water for his head, milk, all the things that a poor little dying boy might need; and old Number 13 passed to and fro shaking his head, for he had been long in hospital and had seen many people die.

A man with knees bent (he said with scroogling them up all winter in the cold) was put in John Willie’s place.  The Velika Dete came back, but he would not speak to “Bent Knees” for weeks.

By this time the Austrian prisoners were very well trained and made excellent orderlies in the ward.  An ex-Carlton waiter was very dexterous in sidling down the ward:  on his five fingers a tray perched high, containing dressing-bowls and pots bristling with forceps, scissors, and various other instruments.

His chief talent lay in peppering frostbitten toes with iodoform powder—­a reminiscence of the sugar castor.

Our housemaid was a leather tanner, whom Jo’s baby magpie mistook for its parent, as he fed it at intervals every morning.  A Czech in typhus cloths spent his days down in the disinfecting, operating and bathrooms.  He had been an overseer in a factory and had added to his income by writing love-stories for the papers.  A butcher was installed in the kitchens.  Once a week he became an artist, killing a sheep according to the best Prague ideals.

All our prisoners, about forty in number, clung to the English hospitals as their only chance of life, for in other places sixty per cent. had died of typhus.

The Serbs, though bearing no animosity, could do little for them.  We saw the quarters of some men working on the road.  These were show quarters and supposed to be clean.  Each room had an outside door.  On the floor was room for six men and hay enough to stuff one pillow.  They had no rugs, and the Serbs could give them none.  The cold in the winter must have been intense.