ard what was once
home.

The story of the hospitals is not always gloomy. Where the
surroundings are favourable, defeat is sometimes turned to victory.
Tetanus is being fought and conquered by means of a serum. The open
treatment of fractures--that is, by cutting down and exposing the
jagged edges of splintered bones, and then uniting them--has saved
many a limb. Conservation is the watchword of the new surgery, to save
whenever possible. The ruthless cutting and hacking of previous wars
is a thing of the past.

I remember a boy in a French hospital whose leg bones had been fairly
shattered. Eight pieces, the surgeon said there had been. Two linear
incisions, connected by a centre one, like a letter H, had been made.
The boy showed me the leg himself, and a mighty proud and happy
youngster he was. There was no vestige of deformity, no shortening.
The incisions had healed by first intention, and the thin, white lines
of the H were all that told the story.

As if to offset the cheer of that recovery, a man in the next bed was
dying of an abdominal injury. I saw the wound. May the mother who bore
him, the wife he loved, never dream of that wound!

I have told of the use of railway stations as temporary resting places
for injured soldiers. One is typical of them all. As my visit was made
during a lull in the fighting, conditions were more than usually
favourable. There was no congestion.

On a bright afternoon early in March I went to the railway station
three miles behind the trenches at E----. Only a mile away a town was
being shelled. One could look across the fields at the changing roof
line, at a church steeple that had so far escaped. But no shells were
falling in E----.

The station was a small village one. In the room corresponding to our
baggage-room straw had been spread over the floor, and men just out of
the trenches lay there in every attitude of exhaustion. In a tiny room
just beyond two or three women were making soup. As fast as one kettle
was ready it was served to the hungry men. There were several
kettles--all the small stove would hold. Soup was there in every
state, from the finished product to the raw meat and vegetables on a
table.

Beyond was a waiting-room, with benches. Here were slightly injured
men, bandaged but able to walk about. A few slept on the benches,
heads lolled back against the whitewashed wall. The others were paying
no attention to the incessant, nearby firing, but were wat