"Better that they drink the beer here than water," remarked the doctor. "We've had some typhoid and cholera cases in Gleiwitz." Now the utterance of that word cholera has a magical effect. In the war zone it can completely spoil your day; no doubt Dr. Sanders must have noticed my uneasiness, for he hastened to add: "There's no danger; we've got all those patients isolated outside this building, and if you haven't had an injection of cholera toxin, I'll give you one." Reassured, I ventured further into the building, and pushing back a swinging door, I saw opened up before me a strange picture. Imagine a theater, its walls washed white, its orchestra stripped of chairs and in their places row after row of hospital cots; a curtain of fireproofed steel, hid the stage, from it hanging the white flag with the red cross, and beside it the stars and stripes and the red, white and black; imagine the boxes filled with rough, hastily made wooden tables where nurses sat making out their reports, a theater where instead of an overture, you heard groans and sometimes a shriek from one of the white cots. "The soldier is only having a nightmare," Dr. Sanders explained. "They come in here sometimes not having slept for three days and they go off asleep for hours and hours--you wonder how long you can put off dressing their wounds to let them sleep--getting these nightmares every once in a while, and yelling out that the Russians are after them. Nearly every soldier who has a nightmare yells that same thing, queer, because none of them fear the Russians at all." Suggesting that we would come back to see the ward more thoroughly, Dr. Sanders led us through the lobby and into what appeared to be a cloakroom. Only now the coat racks were half concealed by huge packing cases marked "American Red Cross," and leaning against the wall you saw two brown stretchers of the United States army; and on the floor army sterilizer chests, while all around shelves had been built holding supplies and medical books. You noticed an operating table in the center of the room and in a corner a little stand for anesthetics. "This is our operating room," smiled the doctor; "you never saw one like it before, did you? Neither did I. But for our purposes it fills the bill." In the lobby we met two boyish surgeons, one, Spearmin, tall, angular and competent-looking; the other, Stem, a University of Maryland man who was preparing for a surgeonship in the United States army when he got the chance to go to the war zone, and, boy-like, went. Spearmin and Stem handle the wounded. Sanders does the executive work. "We get plenty of work to do," Doctor Spearmin told me, "and you want to do everything for those fellows that you can. They are the pluckiest lot of men I ever saw. They stand pain better than most of the average hospital cases that I had in Baltimore."