An immense place, it held rows on rows of other cot beds with white-clad nurses passing about among them. When they spoke or when the patients spoke Mildred could rarely guess what was being said, as she knew so few words of Russian. Yet she had little difficulty with her nursing, for the ways of the ill are universal and she had already seen so much suffering.
Now the hospital room was in half shadow, but it was never light nor aired as the American nurse felt it should be.
The hospital quarters were only a portion of the fortress, a great room, like a barracks which had been hastily turned into a refuge for the wounded.
The long stone chamber boasted only four small windows hardly larger than portholes and some distance from the ground. These opened with difficulty and were protected by heavy iron bars. But then in Russia in many private houses no window is ever voluntarily opened from autumn until Easter, as the cold is so intense and the arrangements for heating so crude.

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