The Sister Superior was the mainspring of the hospital.  She really was a wonderful person, small and insignificant to look at, except for her eyes, which looked you through and through and weighed you in the balance; absolutely true and straight, with a heart of gold, and the very calmest person in all the world.  I remember her, late one evening, when everybody was rather agitated at a message which had come to say that 400 patients were on their way to the hospital, and room could only be made for 200 at the most.  “Never mind,” she said, not in the least perturbed, “they must be made as comfortable as possible on stretchers for the night, and to-morrow we must get some of the others moved away.”  And the Sisters took their cue from her, and those 400 patients were all taken in and looked after with less fuss than the arrival of forty unexpected patients in most hospitals.

All night long that procession of shattered men brought in on stretchers never ceased.  The kitchen Sister stayed up all night so that each man should have some hot soup on arrival, and all the other Sisters were at their posts.  Each man was undressed on the stretcher (often so badly wounded that all his clothing had to be cut off him) and hastily examined by the doctor.  He was then dressed in a clean cotton shirt and trousers and lifted into bed, either to enjoy a bowl of hot soup, or, if the case was urgent, to be taken off in his turn to the operating-room.  And though she was no longer young and not at all strong, there was dear Sister Superior herself all night, taking round the big bowls of soup or sitting beside the dying patients to cheer and comfort their last hours.  How the men loved her.

It was she who gave the whole tone to the hospital—­there the patients and their welfare were the first consideration and nothing else mattered in comparison.  The hospital was not “smart” or “up to date,” the wards were not even tidy, the staff was inadequate, overworked, and villainously housed, the resources very scanty, but for sheer selflessness and utter devotion to their work the staff of that hospital from top to bottom could not have been surpassed.  I never heard a grumble or a complaint all the time I was there either from a doctor, a Sister, or an orderly, and I never saw in this hospital a dressing slurred over, omitted, or done without the usual precautions however tired or overworked everybody might be.

Of course the art of nursing as practised in England does not exist in Russia—­even the trained Sisters do things every hour that would horrify us in England.  One example of this is their custom of giving strong narcotic or stimulating drugs indiscriminately, such as morphine, codeine, camphor, or ether without doctors’ orders.  When untrained Sisters and inexperienced dressers do this (which constantly happens) the results are sometimes very deplorable.  I have myself seen a dresser give a strong hypodermic stimulant to a man with a very serious haemorrhage.