The waiting of the hospital will become the waiting of the refugee.  The Channel coast towns of England are full of human derelicts who stand or sit for hours, looking wistfully back toward what was once home.

The story of the hospitals is not always gloomy.  Where the surroundings are favourable, defeat is sometimes turned to victory.  Tetanus is being fought and conquered by means of a serum.  The open treatment of fractures—­that is, by cutting down and exposing the jagged edges of splintered bones, and then uniting them—­has saved many a limb.  Conservation is the watchword of the new surgery, to save whenever possible.  The ruthless cutting and hacking of previous wars is a thing of the past.

I remember a boy in a French hospital whose leg bones had been fairly shattered.  Eight pieces, the surgeon said there had been.  Two linear incisions, connected by a centre one, like a letter H, had been made.  The boy showed me the leg himself, and a mighty proud and happy youngster he was.  There was no vestige of deformity, no shortening.  The incisions had healed by first intention, and the thin, white lines of the H were all that told the story.

As if to offset the cheer of that recovery, a man in the next bed was dying of an abdominal injury.  I saw the wound.  May the mother who bore him, the wife he loved, never dream of that wound!

I have told of the use of railway stations as temporary resting places for injured soldiers.  One is typical of them all.  As my visit was made during a lull in the fighting, conditions were more than usually favourable.  There was no congestion.

On a bright afternoon early in March I went to the railway station three miles behind the trenches at E——.  Only a mile away a town was being shelled.  One could look across the fields at the changing roof line, at a church steeple that had so far escaped.  But no shells were falling in E——.

The station was a small village one.  In the room corresponding to our baggage-room straw had been spread over the floor, and men just out of the trenches lay there in every attitude of exhaustion.  In a tiny room just beyond two or three women were making soup.  As fast as one kettle was ready it was served to the hungry men.  There were several kettles—­all the small stove would hold.  Soup was there in every state, from the finished product to the raw meat and vegetables on a table.

Beyond was a waiting-room, with benches.  Here were slightly injured men, bandaged but able to walk about.  A few slept on the benches, heads lolled back against the whitewashed wall.  The others were paying no attention to the incessant, nearby firing, but were watching a boy who was drawing.

He had a supply of coloured crayons, and the walls as high as he could reach were almost covered.  There were priests, soldier types, caricatures of the German Emperor, the arms of France and Belgium—­I do not remember what all.  And it was exceedingly well done.  The boy was an artist to his finger tips.