The lazaret was equipped for two hundred patients, but at the time of my visit had only forty, as it was about to be moved further to the front. Operations were performed daily, to be ready for the move. I saw one poor fellow, very frail and no longer young, just after his leg was amputated; he was calling in a piteous way to his mother. In one ward the patients were in a late stage of convalescence from typhus, and in another lay one of the sanitars of the lazaret. In a far corner lay a poor fellow with a wound in the head; his case was hopeless, and he was communicated by the priest in an interval of consciousness. The central wards were full of strong, lusty men, most of them young, some with bad wounds but nearly all getting the better of them. They were in many ways like dormitories of big schoolboys, all of them good comrades--during my stay of some days I only heard one altercation and that was mild and very short. They lived a chance corporate life of their own; and when I went round with cigarettes, there was always some one to see that tired or sleeping comrades got their share. There was very little groaning and no complaint; the men felt their wounds in the long night time, and sometimes one would mention that his wound was smarting. One Armenian, a weak-looking lad of the gentlest disposition, lay striving to bear his pain. "Oh!" he said as he fought it; and then, with closed teeth, "No matter; it doesn't matter; our Emperor ought to be rich; it had to be done--to beat the Germans; it doesn't matter." Usually, however, the wound would only be mentioned in a side sentence in a narrative--"and then I got this," or it would be the occasion for a story of strong life and effort and the triumph of "ours." There was a peculiar delicate courtesy about the halest and strongest, who would shift their wounded limbs with an inviting gesture of the hand, making room for me to sit on their beds; and then there would rise a general stream of narrative where all joined in without ever seeming to interrupt each other, each telling of some daring feat of a comrade against all odds. One will not forget the figures leaning up in bed and the young, radiant faces; many of these men were cripples who will never fight again, but everything about them was full of health and fresh air and victory. A young trooper told me of the actions of his regiment against the Hungarians. They have, it appears, a particularly mobile horse artillery, served with great accuracy by horsemen who fire with the left hand. They enticed the regiment up with displays of white flags and suddenly rent them with a murderous fire. For all that, as in practically all these narratives, in the end the Russians triumphed.