themselves ejected from their own roof-trees: found, in short, (what
many other folk were to learn later) that the State is omnipotent in
war-time and that sectional interests fade into insignificance compared
with the interests of the safety of the commonwealth. Some conception of
the promptness with which this paper scheme of Sir Alfred Keogh's
materialised at the outbreak of war may be gathered from the simple
statement that the building of which I myself write was an Orphans' Home
on August 4th, 1914. At 6 a.m. on August 5th it was a military hospital.

I do not say that it was a military hospital in working order. But if,
by a miracle, wounded _had_ turned up then, there was at least a staff
of medical officers and orderlies on the premises to receive them. In
point of fact it was some weeks before the first patients arrived. Those
weeks, however, were not idle ones. The layman who considers that any
large building can be turned instantaneously into a hospital would have
had an eye-opener if he had witnessed the work done here. The mere
removing of 95 per cent. of the institution's furniture was a colossal
task; added thereto was the introduction of hundreds of beds, hundreds
of mattresses, hundreds of sets of bedclothes, hundreds of suits of
pyjamas, hundreds of--But why prolong a brain-racking list? Then there
was the pulling-down and fixing-up of partitions, the removal of every
single window for replacement by Hopper sashes, the fitting-in of
bathrooms, lavatories, ward-kitchens, sink-rooms, dispensary, cookhouse,
operating-theatre, pathological laboratory, linen-store, steward's
store, clothing-store, detention-room, administration offices, X-ray
department ... all these in a building which, spacious and handsome
outwardly, was, as to its interior, a characteristic maze in the
Scottish baronial style of architecture beloved by mid-Victorian
philanthropists. How the evicted orphans will like to return to those
stone-flagged passages and large airy dormitories, after having