first the public's attitude towards us, the wounded in that engagement, was rather strange--we seemed to be less pitied than those wounded in other battles, but soon even that disappeared too. And only new facts, similar to the one just described, and a case in the enemy's army, when two detachments actually destroyed each other almost entirely, having come to a hand-to-hand fight during the night--gives me the right to think that a mistake did occur. Our doctor, the one that did the amputation, a lean, bony old man, tainted with tobacco smoke and carbolic acid, everlastingly smiling at something through his yellowish-grey thin moustache, said to me, winking his eye,-- "You're in luck to be going home. There's something wrong here." "What is it?" "Something's going wrong. In our time it was simpler." He had taken part in the last European war almost a quarter of a century back and often referred to it with pleasure. But this war he did not understand, and, as I noticed, feared it. "Yes, there's something wrong," sighed he, and frowned, disappearing in a cloud of tobacco smoke. "I would leave too, if I could." And bending over me he whispered through his yellow smoked moustache,-- "A time will come when nobody will be able to go away from here. Yes, neither I nor anybody," and in his old eyes, so close to me, I saw the same fixed, dull, stricken expression. And something terrible, unbearable, resembling the fall of thousands of buildings, darted through my head, and growing cold from terror, I whispered,-- "The red laugh." And he was the first to understand me. He hastily nodded his head and repeated,-- "Yes. The red laugh." He sat down quite close to me and looking round began whispering rapidly, in a senile way, wagging his sharp, grey little beard. "You are leaving soon, and I will tell you. Did you ever see a fight in an asylum? No? Well, I saw one. And they fought like sane people. You understand--like sane people." He significantly repeated the last phrase several times. "Well, and what of that?" asked I, also in a whisper, full of terror. "Nothing. Like sane people." "The red laugh," said I. "They were separated by water being poured over them." I remembered the rain that had frightened us so, and got angry. "You are mad, doctor!" "Not more than you. Not more than you in any case." He hugged his sharp old knees and chuckled; and, looking at me over his shoulder and still with the echo of that unexpected painful laugh on his parched lips, he winked at me slyly several times, as if we two knew something very funny, that nobody else knew. Then with the solemnity of a professor of black magic, giving a conjuring performance, he lifted his arm and, lowering it slowly, carefully touched with two fingers that part of the blanket, under which my legs would have been, if they had not been cut off. "And do you understand this?" he asked mysteriously.