experienced the comforts of the banal but snug suburban villas in which
they are at present located, I know not. There is a certain dignity
about the Scottish baronial pile, I admit. The silhouette of its grey
stone façade, rising above delightful lawns, makes a good
impression--from a distance. Postcard views of it sell freely to
visitors. But the best part of our hospital is hidden behind that
turreted façade, and is much too "ugly" and utilitarian for postcard
immortalisation.

The best part of our hospital--_the_ hospital, to most of us--came into
being when the commandeered Scottish baronial orphans' asylum was found
to be too small. Then were built "the huts."

The word "hut" suggests something casual, of the camping-out order: a
shed knocked together with tin-tacks, doubtfully weather-proof and
probably scamped by profiteering contractors. Of the huts provided at
certain training centres this may have been true. The finely austere
and efficient ranks of hut-wards which constitute the main part of the
3rd London General Hospital are the very antithesis of that picture.
They may look flimsy. They were certainly put up at a remarkable pace. I
myself witnessed the erection of the final fifty of them. An open field
vanished in less than a month, and "Bungalow Town" (as someone nicknamed
it) appeared. You would have said that such speed meant countless
imperfections of detail. No doubt some tinkerings and modifications were
bound to follow, when the regiment of workmen, carpenters, engineers,
drainage specialists, electricians, had vanished. But, in the long run,
the ideal hospital remained--a hospital with which the So-and-So Club in
Pall Mall, for all its luxuriousness, could never hope to compare.

There are still a dozen wards--used mostly for medical cases--in the