"All of you guys have told what you're going to do," he said, "now I'm going to tell you the truth. I'm going back to that little town of mine in Ohio and go down to the grocery store and sit there on a soap box on the porch. "Then I'm going to gather all the little boys in the neighbourhood round about me and then I'm going to outlie the G. A. R." There was one thing in that ward that nobody could lie about and that was the twitches of pain we suffered in the mornings when the old dressings of the day before were changed and new ones applied. The doctor and his woman assistant who had charge of the surgical dressings on that corridor would arrive in the ward shortly after breakfast. They would be wheeling in front of them a rubber-tired, white-enamelled vehicle on which were piled the jars of antiseptic gauze and trays of nickel-plated instruments, which both the doctor and his assistant would handle with rubber-gloved hands. In our ward that vehicle was known as the "Agony Cart," and every time it stopped at the foot of a bed you would be pretty sure to hear a groan or a stifled wail in a few minutes. We had various ways of expressing or suppressing the pain. You who have had a particularly vicious mustard plaster jerked off that tender spot in the back, right between the shoulders, have some small conception of the delicate sensation that accompanies the removal of old gauze from a healing wound. Some of the men would grit their teeth and grunt, others would put their wrists in their mouths and bite themselves during the operation. Some others would try to keep talking to the doctor or the nurse while the ordeal was in progress and others would just simply shout. There was little satisfaction to be gained from these expressions of pain because while one man was yelling the other thirteen in the ward were shouting with glee and chaffing him, and as soon as his wounds had been redressed he would join in the laughs at the expense of those who followed him. There was a Jewish boy in the ward and he had a particularly painful shell wound in his right leg. He was plucky about the painful treatment and used to say to the doctor, "Don't mind me yelling, doc. I can't help it, but you just keep right on." The Jew boy's cry of pain as near as I can reproduce it went something like this, "Oy! Oy!! Oy!!! YOY!!! Doctor!" The Jew boy's clear-toned enunciation of this Yiddish lullaby, as the rest of the ward called it, brought many a heartless, fiendish laugh from the occupants of the other beds. We almost lost one of our patients on account of that laugh. He nearly laughed himself to death--in fact.