and that an order has come down to evacuate and prepare four thousand beds.  Then you watch the newspapers, for you know something is going to happen up there.  And in those same hospitals men are working night and day; the bacteriologists studying “smears” under microscopes, while the surgeons are classifying, operating, “dressing,” marking temperature-charts, and annotating case-sheets.  And in every hospital there is a faint mysterious incense, compounded not disagreeably of chloride of sodium and iodised catgut, which intensifies the dim religious atmosphere of the shaded wards.  If G.H.Q. is the greatest of military academies, the Base hospitals are indubitably the wisest of medical schools.  Never have the sciences of bacteriology and surgery been studied with such devotion as under these urgent clinical impulses.  Here are men of European reputation who have left their laboratories and consulting-rooms at home to wage a never-ending scientific contest with death and corruption.  They have slain “frostbite” with lanoline, turpentine, and a change of socks; they have fought septic wounds with chloride of sodium and the ministries of unlimited oxygen; they have defied “shock” after amputation by “blocking” the nerves of the limb by spinal injection, as a signalman blocks traffic.  They have called in Nature to the aid of science and have summoned the oxygen of the air and the lymph of the body to the self-help of wounds.

High up on the downs is the Convalescent Camp.  Here the O.C. has turned what was a swamp last December into a Garden City, draining, planting, building, installing drying-rooms of asbestos, disinfectors, laundries, and shower-baths, constructing turf incinerators and laying down pavements of brick and slag.  Borders have been planted, grass sown, and shrubs and trees put up—­all this with the labour of the convalescents.  There is a football ground, of which recreation is not the only purpose, for the O.C. has original ideas about distinguishing between “shock,” or neurasthenia, and malingering by other methods than testing a man’s reflexes.  He just walks abstractedly round that football ground of an afternoon and studies the form of the players.  In this self-contained community is a barber’s shop, a cobbler’s, a library, a theatre.  In two neighbouring paddocks are the isolation camps for scarlet fever and cerebro-meningitis, and as soon as a man complains of headache and temperature he is segregated there, preparatory to being sent down to No. 14 Stationary to have his spinal fluid examined by the bacteriologists.  Here, in fact, the man and his kit, instead of being thrown on the scrap-heap, are renewed and made whole, restored in mind, body, and estate, his clothes disinfected and mended, the “snipers” treated to a hot iron, and his razor and tooth-brush replaced.