My friend kept a supply of cigarettes for his ambulance cases, and as soon as the hour-long drive began we dealt them out to the bandaged men. How often we have started with a groaning man for the ride to Zuydcoote, and how well the trip went, when we had lighted his cigarette for him. It brought back a little of the conversation and the merriment which it had called out in better days. It is such a relief to be wounded. You have done your duty, and now you are to have a little rest. With a clear conscience, you can sink back into laziness, far away from noise and filth. Luck has come along and pulled the pack off your back, and the responsibility from your sick mind. No weary city clerk ever went to his seashore holiday with more blitheness than some of our wounded showed as they came riding in from the Nieuport trenches at full length on the stretcher, and singing all the way. What is a splintered forehead or a damaged leg compared to the happiness of an honorable discharge? Nothing to do for a month but lie quietly, and watch the wholesome, clean-clad nurse. I am not forgetting the sadness of many men, nor the men hurt to death, who lay motionless and did not sing, and some of whom died while we were on the road to help. I am only trying to tell of the one man in every four who was glad of his enforced rest, and who didn't let a little thing like agony conquer his gaiety. Those men were the Joyous Wounded. I have seldom seen men more light hearted. Word came to my wife one day that several hundred wounded were side-tracked at Furnes railway station. With two nurses she hurried to them, carrying hot soup. The women went through the train, feeding the soldiers, giving them a drink of cold water, and bringing some of them hot water for washing. Then, being fed, they were ready for a smoke, and my wife began walking down the foul-smelling ambulance car with boxes of supplies, letting each man take out a cigarette and a match. The car was slung with double layers of stretcher bunks. Some men were freshly wounded, others were convalescent. A few lay in a stupor. She provided ten or a dozen soldiers with their pleasure, and they lighted up and were well under way. She had so many patients that day that she was not watching the individual man in her general distribution. She came half way down the car, and held out her store to a soldier without looking at him. He glanced up and grinned. The men in the bunks around him laughed heartily. Then she looked down at him. He was flapping the two stumps of his arms and was smiling. His hands had been blown off. She put the cigarette in his mouth and lit it for him. Only his hands were gone. Comradeship was left for him, and here was the lighted cigarette expressing that comradeship. WAS IT REAL?