The hospital was in a small Prussian town that had been twice devastated by Russian and French troops.

Because it was summer, when it is so beautiful out in the fields, the little town presented a particularly dismal appearance with its broken roofs and fences, its foul streets, tattered inhabitants, and the sick and drunken soldiers wandering about.

The hospital was in a brick building with some of the window frames and panes broken and a courtyard surrounded by the remains of a wooden fence that had been pulled to pieces.

Several bandaged soldiers, with pale swollen faces, were sitting or walking about in the sunshine in the yard.