Hamid Galli had a great joke on himself. All day long he lay on his back and laughed about it. He laughed with his eyes, black and shining like jet beads, and with his mouth, spread wide across a row of gleaming white teeth. He was a Cossack from the Urals, small, brown, and wiry. He and his pony from the Urals, wiry, dark, and spirited like the master himself, had been at the front for three years. Time after time they had both gone into that mad rush of man and horse and steel called a cavalry charge, and come out without a scratch. Three weeks before, the pony had climbed up on his hind legs and toppled his master off. For a Cossack to be thrown from any horse is either a swearing or a laughing matter. Hamid Galli swore, then he tried to pick himself up. To his amazement, he could not move. His leg was broken--broken by his own pony. To Hamid Galli that was a hundred-percent joke. He began to laugh. He was still laughing when the stretcher-bearers carried him away. He laughed while the doctor was setting it. And the nurse told me that even in the night, when the ache of it kept him awake, he laughed quietly to himself. Vasilli, who was in the next bed, smiled also; but Vasilli’s smile was the feeble effort of bloodless lips and trusting blue eyes, deep sunken from long suffering. Vasilli’s smile was the courageous effort of the spirit, and there was no mirth behind it. Vasilli’s deathly white hand rested on the bandaged stump of a once serviceable young leg. One day they wheeled him in to the operating-table, where the doctor was coming to dress his wounds. Vasilli had had one previous experience with operating-tables. A frightened look came into his eyes. He said nothing until the doctor left the room; then in a whisper to the nurse: “Seestra, is he going to cut off my other leg?” “No, no; he is going to dress your leg to make you feel more comfortable,” she answered. The feeble, patient smile crept into Vasilli’s blue eyes. “Isn’t he good to me?” he said. Ivan Markovitch, in the ward beyond, neither smiled nor laughed. Ivan lay on the pillow, his face ghastly gray and his breath coming in short, quick gasps. When Peter offered him cigarettes, he shook his head, and we had to stoop low over the bed to catch the faint words that came in whispers from his lips. In the whole wide world Ivan could find no cause for laughing. He had tuberculosis; and the pity in the eyes of the sister, when she looked at him, confirmed my worst fears. Ivan was twenty, and the only boy in a large family of girls. His people were peasant farmers, and until he was drafted for a soldier, he spent all his days in the fields, cultivating the hemp and flax and planting potatoes. The winter before in the trenches he took cold. His lungs began to pain, and he applied several times to be allowed to see the doctor.