[Sidenote: Women nurses go without sleep.]

"If any one of those women has had a wink of sleep in the last three
days," Captain X---- had said as we reined in to let a string of
ambulances go by, "it must have been taken standing. I have been up most
of the time myself, and never once have I looked across to the clearing
station but I saw some sign of a nurse on the move."

[Sidenote: Venizelos at the nurses' mess.]

Madame A---- had asked me to drop in at the nurses' mess for luncheon in
case I got back from the trenches in time, and this, by dint of hard
riding, I was just able to do. Three or four powerful military cars
drawn up at the hospital gate indicated new arrivals, but as to who they
were I had no hint until I had pushed in through the flap of the mess
tent and found M. Venizelos seated on a soap-box, _vis-à-vis_ Madame
A---- at a table improvised from a couple of condensed milk cases. At
the regular mess table, sitting on reversed water-buckets, were three
French flying officers and a civilian whom I recognized as the private
secretary of M. Venizelos. Two nurses were just rising from unfinished
plates of soup in response to word that a crucial abdominal operation
awaited their attendance at the theatre.

"Most of the Provisional Government has come out to pay us a visit this
morning," said Madame A----, showing me to a blanket-roll seat at one
end of the mess table, "and we are lunching early so that it can get
back to Saloniki to take up the reins of State again. The General has
carried off the Admiral and the Foreign Minister, but I have managed to
keep the President for _our_ banquet. He has made the round of the
hospital and spoken to every man here--that is," she added with a catch