As you walked between the cots you were conscious of the gaze of the wounded turned hopefully on this business-like American. Of the peasant class nearly all the soldiers seemed to regain hope at the sight of him. So it was with the two boys off in a corner by themselves. They were rather slender fellows, amazingly young, with mischievous faces. "They live next door to each other," said the doctor, "in a little village in Schleswig-Holstein. The one on the left had a bullet in his brain, the other had his arm fractured by a piece of shrapnel."
"How old are they?"
"The boy who had the bullet in his brain," said the doctor, "is not yet seventeen; the other is a few months older."
They met you with a bold smile, fun darting from their mischievous eyes, like American boys might smile at a foreigner. You saw that they wore the clean, light blue jackets that mark every patient of the American Red Cross, but you thought of the dirty, gray-green uniforms and how long these boys had lain before they were picked up. And then, like many youngsters you see in the first classes of a high school, they became self-conscious, giggling like girls at a first party, and you thought of them at war; and a shuddery sensation came over you.
"You think it's terrible, don't you?" he said. "Wait a minute."
He beckoned Sister Anna, and she joined us.
"Sister Anna," he said, "ask that boy with the brain wound to tell the story that he told me the other day."
Sister Anna's manner was reluctant, and you doubt that she wanted to hear that story again. But she put the request in German, and instantly the eyes of the little fellow grew bright.
"We were near Iwangorod," he began. "Max and I were on outpost duty and got cut off from our regiment. Night came and we started back to find them. We were passing through a little village, just five or six houses, when somebody shot at us." He paused, turning, as if for confirmation, to the other bed, where Max, half sitting up, nodded eagerly. "We'll fix them, Max," I said, "and we ran behind a house, so they couldn't shoot again. Then all lights in the windows went out—every light in the village. I was glad there was no moon. We got some wood, a lot of it. We fixed it in piles beside every house. We broke into a cellar and stole some oil. We emptied the oil on the wood, then we lit it, and ran to the next house, and lit it there." His eyes were burning feverishly. "Pretty soon we had the whole village on fire, didn't we, Max?"
"Ja! Ja!" cried Max, from the other bed.