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