[Illustration:  IN-PATIENTS.]

The spring came, bringing with it no fighting.  A great offensive was expected, had been ordered, in fact, but we heard later that the army refused to advance.  The work was very much lighter.  Very few men were entirely helpless.  The hospitals, which were still emptying themselves and whose men were coming to us, sent the survival of the fittest.  Most of the beds were carried out under the trees after the morning dressings were done, and the men lay gossiping and smoking when they could get tobacco.  Outside visitors were rare.  The Serbian ladies do not go round the hospitals with cigarettes and sweets, and to find a Serbian woman nursing is an anomaly.

Report says that many flung themselves into it with energy during the first Balkan War, but that four years of it, ending with typhus, had dulled their enthusiasm.  It is not fair to blame them.  To nurse from morning till night in a putrid Serbian hospital with all windows closed requires more than devotion and complete indifference to life.  Three Serbian ladies came to sew pillow cases and sheets every afternoon, and one of them gave up still more time to teach the patients reading and writing.

But the town was full, in the summer, of smartly dressed women, and the village priest never once visited our hospitals.  Hearing of the English missions and their work, peasants began to come from the mountains around, and the out-patient department became, under Dr. Helen Boyle, a matter for strenuous mornings.

Many of these poor things had never seen a doctor in their lives.  Serbia even in peace-time had not produced many medical men, and those who existed had no time to attend the poor gratis.

The percentage of consumptives was enormous.  Every family shuts its windows and doors for the winter and proceeds industriously to spit, and so the disease spreads.

Diphtheria patients rode and walked often for ten hours and waited in the courtyard, and people far gone with typhus staggered along in the blazing spring sun.

One jolly old ragatops with typhus arrived in the afternoon with a violent temperature, and Jo settled him comfortably in the courtyard with his head on a sink until Mrs. Berry should come in to see about taking him into the barracks.  He seemed quite happy about himself, but very worried about his blind beggar brother and his two half-blind children, whose sight had been ruined by smallpox.

For the latter nothing could be done.

Another time she kept two boys waiting to see if Mrs. Berry could take them into her typhus barracks.  One had scarlet fever, and the other was a young starving clerk in a galloping consumption, thirty-six hours from his home.

Afraid to raise their hopes, and not knowing if there would be room for them, Jo told them that they were to have some very strong medicine that could only be administered two hours after a dose of hot milk and biscuit (the medicine was only bovril).  By this time Mrs. Berry arrived and managed to squeeze the boys in.