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
temperature he is segregated there, preparatory to being sent down to
No. 14 Stationary to have his spinal fluid examined by the
bacteriologists. Here, in fact, the man and his kit, instead of being
thrown on the scrap-heap, are renewed and made whole, restored in mind,
body, and estate, his clothes disinfected and mended, the "snipers"
treated to a hot iron, and his razor and tooth-brush replaced.

For true it is that at the Base they study loving-kindness, and
chaplains and doctors and nurses are busy with delicate ministries
seeking to cure, to assuage, and to console. Alas! on what tragic
errands do so many come and go; parents like Joseph and Mary seeking
their child, and wives their husbands, in hope, in fear, in joy, in
anguish, too often finding that the bright spirit has returned to God
Who gave it, and that nothing is left but to follow him behind the bier
draped with the Union Jack to the little cemetery on the hill.... But
for one that is buried here a thousand lie where they fell. Those
stricken fields of Flanders! nevermore will they be for us the scene of
an idle holiday; they will be a place of pilgrimage and a shrine of
prayer. I well remember--I can never forget--a journey I made in the
company of a French staff officer over the country that lies between
Paris and the river Aisn