unlimited supply of tea will do much to oil the wheels of hospital life.

But to myself the all-important room was the operating theatre, for
upon its resources depended entirely our opportunities for surgical
work. It was in every way admirable, and I know plenty of hospitals in
London whose theatres would not bear comparison with ours. Three
long windows faced the courtyard; there was a great bunch of electric
lights in the ceiling, and there was a constant supply of boiling water.
What more could the heart of surgeon desire? There were two
operating tables and an equipment of instruments to vie with any in a
London hospital. Somebody must have been very extravagant over
those instruments, I thought as I looked at them; but he was right and
I was wrong, for there were very few of those instruments for which I
was not grateful before long. The surgery of war is a very different
thing from the surgery of home.

The wards were full when we arrived, and I had a wonderful
opportunity of studying the effects of rifle and shell fire. Most of the
wounds were fortunately slight, but some of them were terrible, and,
indeed, in some cases it seemed little short of miraculous that the
men had survived. But on every side one saw nothing but cheerful
faces, and one would never have dreamt what some of those men
had gone through. They were all smoking cigarettes, laughing, and
chatting, as cheery a set of fellows as one could meet. You would
never have suspected that a few days before those same men had
been carried into the hospital in most cases at their last gasp from
loss of blood and exposure, for none but serious cases were
admitted. The cheeriest man in the place was called Rasquinet, a
wounded officer who had been christened "Ragtime" for short, and for
affection. A week before he had been struck by a shell in the left side,