In some of these lonely hospitals hell breaks loose at night.  The peasant women must sleep.  Even the tireless nuns cannot labour forever without rest.  The men have come from battlefields of infinite horror.  A frenzied dream, a delirious soldier calling them to the charge, and panic rages.

To offset these horrors of the night the peasants have, here and there, resorted to music.  It is naive, pathetic.  Where there is a piano it is moved into the school, or garage, or whatever the building may be, and at twilight a nun or a volunteer musician plays quietly, to soothe the men to sleep.  In one or two towns a village band, or perhaps a lone cornetist, plays in the street outside.

So the days go on, and the nights.  Supplies are begged for and do not always come.  Dressings are washed, to be used again and again.

An attempt is now being made to better these conditions.  A Frenchwoman helping in one of these hospitals, and driven almost to madness by the outcries of men and boys undergoing operations without anaesthetics, found her appeals for help unanswered.  She decided to go to England to ask her friends there for chloroform, and to take it back on the next boat.  She was successful.  She carried back with her, on numerous journeys, dressings, chloroform, cotton, even a few instruments.  She is still doing this work.  Others interested in isolated hospitals, hearing of her success, appealed to her; and now regular, if small, shipments of chloroform and dressings are going across the Channel.

Americans willing to take their own cars, and willing to work, will find plenty to do in distributing such supplies over there.  A request has come to me to find such Americans.  Surgeons who can spare a scalpel, an artery clip or two, ligatures—­catgut or silk—­and forceps, may be certain of having them used at once.  Bandages rolled by kindly American hands will not lie unclaimed on the quay at Havre or Calais.

So many things about these little hospitals of France are touching, without having any particular connection.  There was a surgeon in one of these isolated villages, with an X-ray machine but no gloves or lead screen to protect himself.  He worked on, using the deadly rays to locate pieces of shell, bullets and shrapnel, and knowing all the time what would happen.  He has lost both hands.

Since my return to America the problems of those who care for the sick and wounded have been further complicated, among the Allies, by the inhuman use of asphyxiating gases.

Sir John French says of these gases: 

“The effect of this poison is not merely disabling, or even painlessly fatal, as suggested in the German press.  Those of its victims who do not succumb on the field and who can be brought into hospitals suffer acutely and, in a large proportion of cases, die a painful and lingering death.  Those who survive are in little better case, as the injury to their lungs appears to be of a permanent character and reduces them to a condition that points to their being invalids for life.”