A deathly hush fell upon the square. For an interminable half-hour we listened to the humming of the motor, momentarily expecting a message from the bird-man and quite oblivious of the softly falling rain. Then gradually the sound diminished in volume, and finally ceased altogether. The _rat-tat-tat_ of the machine-gun of the adjoining battery announced that the fate of the visitor had passed beyond the possible control of our Captain. We went back to the samovar and fresh glasses of tea. Fair weather had departed. The crisp, clear days of blue and gold were gone. Rain came down in torrents, and dry boots and I became utter strangers. The first wet day I spent in the hospital. In the morning I slipped on a nurse’s smock and went to the surgery. It was not war out there in the moonlight. The tinkling telephones, the captured Austrian machine-gun, the cellar full of American ammunition,--even the whirring of the motors and the boom of the guns to the west,--could not make it seem real. But here in the surgery were shattered bones and tortured flesh, the agonized faces of patient men, and the terrible stench of gangrene. This was war. The first anguished cry of “Gaspadin docteur” sent me to the operating-table. It was impossible to stay in that room and do nothing. I put my first-aid knowledge timidly to work, and before the morning was over two or three patients were calling me “Sestra” and taxing my meager knowledge of Russian and my intuition to its limit. Once the doctor beckoned me to look at a horrible mass of decayed flesh that had been a leg. “Dum-dum bullet,” he told me. At luncheon Peter was in high spirits. War had taken hold of his imagination. He saw it as a great game. “You’d better see the surgery,” I suggested. He refused, but he spent the afternoon with me in the hospital wards, to which we took a supply of cigarettes and matches. All of Russia was gathered under that roof. There were Little Russians, merry-souled chaps, blue-eyed and fair-haired, who came from a land where the sun shines much and the earth yields plentifully. There were Veliko’rus, or Big Russians, inured to hardship, their sterner struggle with the soil photographed upon their determined faces. Scattered among them were fair-haired Cossacks from the Don and dark-skinned Cossacks from the Urals with a strain of Tartar marked in the slant of their eyes and the color of their skin. Sometimes it was an Esthonian who looked up from the pillow, a Pole, a Lett, a Lithuanian, or a member of one of the numerous Caucasian or Siberian tribes. There were three who stood above the others: Hamid Galli, Vasilli, and Ivan Markovitch.