It was far into the night when we arrived at our hospital burdened with our two bags and the copper tray.

The night nurse, a kitten, and a round woolly puppy welcomed us.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER XIV

MAINLY RETROSPECTIVE

Hospital work again.  How strange we felt.  A sad-faced little Serbian lady, widowed through typhus, was interpreting for the out-patients while Jo was away; but she was alone in the world and did not want to go—­so Jo, homesick for her beloved out-patients, had to make the best of it and do other work.  The Serbian youth who had been put on the staff as secretary, was dangerously ill with typhoid fever, which he had picked up at Kragujevatz.  The typhus barrack was a children’s hospital, containing little waifs chosen from the out-patients, and a few women.

In the early days when we had first arrived at Vrntze there were several overfilled Serbian and one Greek hospital.  They were only cafes and large villas, unsanitary, stuffy, and overworked.  The windows were never open, and through the huge sheets of plate glass could be dimly seen in the thick blue tobacco smoke a higgledy-piggledy crowd of beds.  Often two men lay in one bed covered with their dirty great coats, while typhus patients and wounded men slept together.  One man lay unconscious for several days in the window, his feet in his dinner-plate.  At last he died, his feet still in the dinner.  Mr. Berry took on a hydropathic establishment which had been completed just before the first Balkan War.  This was used as the central hospital, where the staff lodged, and the most serious surgical cases were nursed.  In the basement an operating-room was rigged up, there were bathrooms, disinfecting-rooms, a laundry, and an engine-house, where gimcrack German machinery in fits and starts provided us with electric light and hot water.  The village school on the hill opposite was annexed and cleaned by a sculptor, a singer, a painter, and a judge of the Royal Horse Show.  This was run as a convalescent home, and was the cause of many a muddy sit down, as it lay on the top of a greasy hill.

Other large buildings were gradually added, sulphured, and cleaned until we had six hospitals, one of which was run for some time in connection with the Red Cross unit.

Typhus had not stricken the village badly, but the old barracks were full of cases which developed several days after each batch of wounded came.

The Red Cross unit took on the typhus barracks.  Mr. Berry, seeing that surgery was for the moment a secondary thing, and having received a batch of Austrian prisoners riddled with typhus, built some barracks not far from the school.  Glass was unobtainable, so thin muslin was used for the windows.

The first precaution against bad air that Mr. Berry took in preparing his chief surgical ward was to smash all top panes of the windows with a broom, thus earning the name of the Window Breaker.  Whenever the wind blew through the draughty corridors and glass rattled down from the sashes, word went round that “Mr. Berry has been at it again.”