out our wounded as an intimation that our services
would be no longer required. We got all our men ready for transport,
and proceeded to pack up the hospital. The tramcars arrived, and we
bade good-bye to our patients, and saw them off, some in ordinary
trams and some in specially equipped stretcher-cars. It was a dismal
scene.

The hall of the hospital was still covered with stretchers on which lay
patients waiting their turn for the cars to take them, and the whole
hospital was in process of being dismantled, when tramcars began to
arrive back from the station with the patients we had just packed off.
They told us that the whole of Antwerp was covered with tramloads of
wounded soldiers, that there were five thousand in the square in front
of the railway station, and that two trains had been provided to take
them away! It was evident that some extraordinary blunder had been
made; and while we were in doubt as to what to do, a second order
came to us cancelling entirely the evacuation order which we and all
the other hospitals in Antwerp had received a few hours before. It was
all so perplexing that we felt that the only satisfactory plan was to go
round to the British Consul and find out what it all meant. We came
back with the great news that British Marines were coming to hold
Antwerp. That was good enough for us. In less than an hour the
hospital was in working order again, and the patients were back in
their beds, and a more jubilant set of patients I have never seen. It
was the most joyful day in the history of the hospital, and if we had
had a case of champagne, it should have been opened. As it was, we
had to be content with salt coffee.

But there was one dreadful tragedy. Some of our patients had not
returned. In the confusion at the station one tramcar loaded with our
patients had been sent off to another hospital by mistake. And the
worst of it was that some of these were our favourite patients. There
was nothing for it but to start next morning and make a tour of the
hospitals in search of them. We were not long in finding them, for
most of them were in a large hospital close by. I do not think we shall
ever forget the reception we got when we found them. They had left
us on stretchers, but they tried to get out of bed to come away with
us, and one of them was a septic factured thigh with a hole in his leg
into which you could put your fist, and another had recently had a
serious abdominal operation.