schoolrooms were
still filled--every inch of space--with a motley collection of beds,
on which men lay in their uniforms, for lack of other clothing. They
were covered with old patchwork quilts, with anything that can be
used. There were, of course, no sheets. All the sheets were used long
ago for dressings. A friend of mine there recently saw a soldier with
one leg, in the kitchen, rolling wretched scraps and dusters for
bandages. There was no way to sterilise them, of course. Once a week a
surgeon comes. When he goes away he takes his instruments with him.

This is not an isolated case, nor an exaggerated one. There are things
I do not care to publish. Three hundred and more such hospitals are
known. The French Government pays, or will pay, twenty-five cents a
day to keep these men. Black bread and _pot-a-feu_ is all that can be
managed on that amount.

Convalescents sit up in bed and painfully unravel their tattered socks
for wool. They tie the bits together, often two or three inches in
length, and knit new feet in old socks, or--when they secure
enough--new socks. For the Germans hold the wool cities of France.
Ordinarily worsted costs eighteen and nineteen francs in Dinard and
Saint Malo, or from three dollars and sixty cents to three dollars and
eighty cents a pound. Much of the government reserves of woollen
underwear for the soldiers was in the captured towns, and German
prisoners have been found wearing woollens with the French Government
stamp.

Every sort of building is being used for these isolated
hospitals--garages, town halls, private dwellings, schools. At first
they had no chloroform, no instruments. There are cases on record
where automobile tools were used in emergency, kitchen knives, saws,
anything. In one case, last spring, two hundred convalescents, leaving
one of these hospitals on a cold day in March, were called back, on
the arrival of a hundred freshly wounded men, that every superfluous
bandage on their wounds might be removed, to be used again.

Naturally, depending entirely on the unskilled nursing of the village
women, much that we regard as fundamental in hospital practice is
ignored. Wounded men, typhoid and scarlet fever cases are found in the
same wards. In one isolated town a single clinical thermometer is
obliged to serve for sixty typhoid and scarlet fever patients.[F]

[Footnote F: Written in June, 1915.]

Sometimes the men in these isolated and ill-equipped refuges realise