This was the fourth time I had run across him since the beginning of the war--at Insterburg, where the Junior Subaltern was leading his company toward Königsberg; then in the trenches beyond Tarnovo; then in the vicinity of Lublin, during the great retreat; and now, the fourth time. "I am stationed twelve versts from Czernowitz," he went on to explain. The Junior Subaltern is really so young that you can't help envying him. His face shines with health. His eyes are always laughing. His speech is very simple, but impressive; but he does not like to talk; he would rather listen, and laugh responsively with his eyes. Fortune had brought us together; several men sitting down to a common meal. We talked freely about everything. The conversation turned to the German habit of finishing all the wounded enemies they find after a successful battle. During the forest fighting last August one of us had come across sixty Cossacks who had been but slightly wounded, and whom the Germans had hanged on the trees. "We avenged them, however; the Germans got something to remember!" said the narrator. Lieutenant X.'s eyes sparkled with animation. "Well," he said, "of course they deserved it! Of course it is a crime to kill the wounded. But, gentlemen, there are cases when it is impossible not to kill the wounded!" "What on earth do you mean?" "Just what I said! There is such a thing as rightful killing of the wounded!" We insisted, and the Junior Subaltern narrated a recent experience of his, "somewhere in Bukowina." He had been in command of a party of scouts. His regiment had just arrived to take the place of another infantry regiment. And the first thing to do was to become acquainted with the locality and to learn the dispositions and intentions of the enemy. The Junior Subaltern was sent out with his company. At one place the opposing armies were separated by a ravine, which forked out toward our trenches. Lieutenant X. knew that the men of the regiment his was replacing had become acquainted with the Austrians, and that the enemies by day came together at the bottom of the ravine by night, entertained one another, and gossiped. "War is burdensome, gentlemen!" explained the Junior Subaltern, "and we all longed for even the semblance of human intercourse with the other chaps. * * * And there happened to be a prolonged and tiresome spell of calm between battles, and so the men of the regiment we were replacing and the Austrians had long smokes together, exchanging pipes. But every one remembered--and nobody held it against any one--that the course of cigarettes must be closely interwoven with the course of bullets on the morrow. * * * Yet, yet--oh, if we were only chivalrous knights, conducting a picturesque tournament, instead of common Russian cannon fodder fighting common Austrian cannon fodder. * * *"