So the peasant woman of D——­ comes to the hospital, bringing a few eggs, the midday meal of her family, who will do without.

I have spoken mainly in the past tense, but conditions in D——­ are not greatly changed to-day.  An old marquise, impoverished by the war, darns the pathetic socks of the wounded men and mends their uniforms.  At the last report I received, the corridors and schoolrooms were still filled—­every inch of space—­with a motley collection of beds, on which men lay in their uniforms, for lack of other clothing.  They were covered with old patchwork quilts, with anything that can be used.  There were, of course, no sheets.  All the sheets were used long ago for dressings.  A friend of mine there recently saw a soldier with one leg, in the kitchen, rolling wretched scraps and dusters for bandages.  There was no way to sterilise them, of course.  Once a week a surgeon comes.  When he goes away he takes his instruments with him.

This is not an isolated case, nor an exaggerated one.  There are things I do not care to publish.  Three hundred and more such hospitals are known.  The French Government pays, or will pay, twenty-five cents a day to keep these men.  Black bread and pot-a-feu is all that can be managed on that amount.

Convalescents sit up in bed and painfully unravel their tattered socks for wool.  They tie the bits together, often two or three inches in length, and knit new feet in old socks, or—­when they secure enough—­new socks.  For the Germans hold the wool cities of France.  Ordinarily worsted costs eighteen and nineteen francs in Dinard and Saint Malo, or from three dollars and sixty cents to three dollars and eighty cents a pound.  Much of the government reserves of woollen underwear for the soldiers was in the captured towns, and German prisoners have been found wearing woollens with the French Government stamp.

Every sort of building is being used for these isolated hospitals—­garages, town halls, private dwellings, schools.  At first they had no chloroform, no instruments.  There are cases on record where automobile tools were used in emergency, kitchen knives, saws, anything.  In one case, last spring, two hundred convalescents, leaving one of these hospitals on a cold day in March, were called back, on the arrival of a hundred freshly wounded men, that every superfluous bandage on their wounds might be removed, to be used again.

Naturally, depending entirely on the unskilled nursing of the village women, much that we regard as fundamental in hospital practice is ignored.  Wounded men, typhoid and scarlet fever cases are found in the same wards.  In one isolated town a single clinical thermometer is obliged to serve for sixty typhoid and scarlet fever patients.[F]

[Footnote F:  Written in June, 1915.]

Sometimes the men in these isolated and ill-equipped refuges realise the horror and hopelessness of their situation.  The nights are particularly bad.  Any one who knows hospitals well, knows the night terrors of the wards; knows, too, the contagion of excitement that proceeds from a hysterical or delirious patient.