As to the feeding and cooking and washing of the armies, the story is no less wonderful, and I remember as I read the great camp laundry at Etaples that I went through in 1917, with its busy throng of Frenchwomen at work and its 30,000 items a day.  Twenty-five thousand cooks have been trained in the cookery schools of the Army, while a jealous watch has been kept on all waste and by-products under an Inspectorate of Economies.  As to the care of the horses, in health or in sickness, the British Remount and Veterinary Service has been famed throughout Europe for efficiency and humanity.

Of the vast hospital service, what can one say that has not been said a thousand tunes already?  Between the spring of 1916, when I first saw the fighting front, and November, 1918, the hospital accommodation in France rose from 44,000 to 175,000 persons.  That is to say, we kept our wounded in France during the height of the submarine campaign, both to protect them from the chance of further suffering, and to economise our dwindling tonnage, and fresh hospitals had to be built for them.  Of the doctors and nurses, the stretcher-bearers and orderlies, whose brave and sacred work it was to gather the wounded from the battle-line, and to bring to bear upon the suffering and martyrdom of war all that human skill and human tenderness could devise, Sir Douglas Haig has said many true and eloquent things in the course of his despatches.  He sums them all up in his last despatch in the plain words:  “In spite of the numbers dealt with, there has been no war in which the resources of science have been utilised so generously and successfully for the quick evacuation and careful tending of the sick and wounded, or for the prevention of disease.”

Most true—­and yet?  Do not let us deceive ourselves!  The utmost energy, the tenderest devotion, the noblest skill, can go but a certain way when measured against the sum total of human suffering caused by war.  The ablest of doctors and nurses are the first to admit it.  Those of us whose wounded brothers and sons reached in safety the haven of hospital comfort and skilled nursing, and were thereby brought back to life, are, thank Heaven, the fortunate many.  But there are the few for whose dear ones all that wonderful hospital and nursing science was of no avail.  I think of a gallant boy lying out all night with a broken thigh in a shell-hole amid the mud and under the rain of Flanders.  Kind hands come with the morning and carry him to the advanced dressing station.  There is still hope.  But miles of mud and broken ground lie between him and the nearest hospital.  Immediate warmth and rest and nursing might have saved him.  But they are unattainable.  Brave men carry the boy tenderly, carefully, the three miles to the casualty clearing station.  The strain on the flickering life is just too much, and in the first night of hospital, when every care is round it, the young life slips away—­lost by so little—­by no fault!