buzzing like hornets as they sailed away into the valley behind. While I was making my way up to the left of our line, I saw three Turkish artillerymen lying dead. One had been shot in the abdomen, and presented a terrible spectacle with his intestines all hanging out. The two others had had their legs carried away by shells. When I reached the farthest battery, I found one of the gunners with his hand ripped open by a splinter of iron, and I rendered surgical aid to my first wounded man under fire, washing the injury with water from my water-bottle, sewing up the hand, and dressing it with tiftig from my wallet. Then I sent the man to the rear, and told him to report himself at the hospital. Here it was too that I saw my first man killed in the open field. It happened this way. I was lying on my stomach exactly on the summit of the hill, and about twenty-five yards from the end gun of the battery, watching the Russian practice, when I saw six simultaneous puffs of smoke and six flashes of fire dart from the oak wood on the distant slope. One of the gunners at the end gun in the battery next to me was in the act of "laying" it, and was squinting along the sights to get the elevation of the Russian battery, when the six shells started on their journey. Those flashes of fire were the last things he ever saw on earth, for one of the shells struck him full in the face and took his head clean off. There was a spirting from the blood-vessels in the neck, and then the headless corpse spun round in a circle, the legs moving convulsively like those of a chicken when its throat is cut. I was so close to the man that I could see every movement, and the sight affected my nerve centres in the way that the normal system is affected by any sudden and horrible sight; that is to say, I turned cold all over, and was very sick on the spot. A few months later the frequent repetition of similar spectacles had so dulled the sensitiveness of my nerve centres, that I could look upon the most shocking casualties without experiencing the slightest physical inconvenience. We dragged the gunner's headless corpse to the rear, where it was buried the same evening. Both sides ceased firing at about six o'clock, at which time we had only nine men killed and three wounded. I heard afterwards that the Russian loss was also small. The demonstration hardly rose to the dignity of an engagement, and doubtless the Russians regarded it more as an appetizer for the solid fare to follow than anything else. At Russian dinner parties there is always a preliminary course called the _zacuska_, consisting generally of caviare or sardines devilled with cayenne, with which the guests are expected to sharpen their appetites. This artillery duel was the zacuska to prepare the combatants for the _pièce de résistance_ on the morrow.