Dressing Station, where more attention is given to it; and thence to (3) the Field Ambulance proper, where the case is really diagnosed and provisionally classed.  By this time motor-ambulances have been much used; and the stream, which was a trickle at the Aid Post, has grown wider.  The next point (4) is the Casualty Clearing Station.  Casualty Clearing Stations are imposing affairs.  Not until the horizontal form reaches them can an operation in the full sense of the word be performed upon it.  The Clearing Station that I saw could accommodate seven hundred cases, and had held nearer eight hundred.  It was housed in an extensive public building.  It employed seven surgeons, and I forget how many dressers.  It had an abdominal ward, where cases were kept until they could take solid food; and a head ward; and an officers’ ward; immense stores; a Church of England chapel; and a shoot down which mattresses with patients thereon could be slid in case of fire.

Nearly seven hundred operations had been performed in it during the war.  Nevertheless, as the young Colonel in charge said to me:  “The function of a Clearing Station is to clear.  We keep the majority of the cases only a few hours.”  Thence the horizontal forms pass into (5) Ambulance Trains.  But besides Ambulance trains there are Ambulance barges, grand vessels flying the Union Jack and the Red Cross, with lifts, electric light, and an operating-table.  They are towed by a tug to the coast through convenient canals.

You may catch the stream once more, and at its fullest, in (6) the splendid hospitals at Boulogne.  At Boulogne the hospital laundry work is such that it has overpowered the town and has to be sent to England.  But even at Boulogne, where the most solid architecture, expensively transformed, gives an air of utter permanency to the hospitals, the watchword is still to clear, to pass the cases on.  The next stage (7) is the Hospital Ship, specially fitted out, waiting in the harbour for its complement.  When the horizontal forms leave the ship they are in England; they are among us, and the great stream divides into many streams, just as at the rail-head at the other end the great stream of supply divides into many streams, and is lost.

Nor are men the only beings cared for.  One of the strangest things I saw at Boulogne was a horse-hospital, consisting of a meadow of many acres.  Those who imagine that horses are not used in modern war should see the thousands of horses tethered in that meadow.  Many if not most of them were suffering from shell wounds, and the sufferers were rather human.  I saw a horse operated on under chloroform.  He refused to come to after the operation was over, and as I left he was being encouraged to do so by movements of the limbs to induce respiration.  Impossible, after that, to think of him as a mere horse!