The roar of the artillery battle flared up and died down by spells, but the steady throb of the Anvil Chorus followed us down the wind for some minutes after another bend in the stone wall cut off our view of the singers. How often I have wondered which ones of that careless trio survived that day, or the next, or the one after that; which, if any, of them is still beating time on the red-brown rocks of the Carso to the air of that haunting refrain! I was told that the wounded are sometimes located on the battlefield by their singing; that they not infrequently sing while being borne in on stretchers or transported in ambulances. I had no chance to observe personally instances of this kind, but I did hear, time and time again, men singing in the hospitals, and they were not all convalescents or lightly wounded either. One brave little fellow in that fine British hospital on the Isonzo front, conducted with such conspicuous success by the British Red Cross, I shall never forget. An explosive bullet had carried away all four fingers of his right hand, leaving behind it an infection which had run into gaseous gangrene. The stump swelled to a hideous mass, about the shape and size of a ten-pound ham, but the doctors were fighting amputation in the hope of saving the wrist and thumb, to have something to which artificial members might be attached. The crisis was over at the time I visited the hospital, but the whole arm was still so inflamed that the plucky lad had to close his eyes and set his teeth to keep from crying out with agony as the matron lifted the stump to show me the “beautiful healthy red colour” where healing had begun. The matron had some “splendid” trench-foot cases to show me farther along, and these, with some interesting experiments in disinfection by “irrigation,” were engrossing my attention, when a sort of a crooning hum caused me to turn and look at the patient in the bed behind me. It was the “gaseous gangrene” boy again. We had worked down the next row till we were opposite him once more, and in the quarter-hour which had elapsed his nurse had set a basin of disinfectant on his bed in which to bathe his wound. Into this she had lifted the hideously swollen stump and hurried on to her next patient. And there he lay, swaying the repulsive mass of mortified flesh that was still a part of him back and forth in the healing liquid, the while he crooned a little song to it as a mother rocks her child to sleep as she sings a lullaby.