ade the tour of our wards, and arranged for
the removal to the base hospital at Dunkirk of all whom we
wished to send away. It gave us the further advantage of
special privileges for our cars and ambulances, which were
allowed to go practically anywhere in search of the wounded
with absolute freedom. Formerly we had owed a great deal to
the assistance of the Belgian Croix Rouge, who had been very
good in supplementing our supply of dressings, as well as in
getting us army rations for the patients. This, of course, had all
come to an end, and we now had to rely on our own resources.

Our personnel had undergone considerable alteration, for while
several of our original members had dropped out, we had
joined forces with Dr. Hector Munro's Ambulance Corps, and
four of their doctors had joined our medical staff. Dr. Munro and
his party had worked in connection with the hospitals of Ghent
till the German advance forced both them and ourselves to
retreat to Ostend. There we met and arranged to carry on our
work together at Furnes. The arrangement was of the greatest
possible advantage to both of us, for it gave us the service of
their splendid fleet of ambulances, and it gave them a base to
which to bring their wounded. We were thus able to get the
wounded into hospital in an unusually short space of time, and
to deal effectively with many cases which would otherwise have
been hopeless. Smooth coordination with an ambulance party
is, in fact, the first essential for the satisfactory working of an
advanced hospital. If full use is to be made of its advantages,
the wounded must be collected and brought in with the minimum
of delay, whilst it must be possible to evacuate at once all who
are fit to be moved back to the base. In both respects we were
at Furnes exceptionally well placed.

We were established in a large straggling building of no
attraction whatever except its cubic capacity. It was fairly new,
and devoid of any of the interest of antiquity, but it presented
none of the advantages of modern architecture. In fact, it was
extremely ugly and extremely inconvenient, but it was large.
Two of the largest classrooms and the refectory were converted
into wards. At first the question of beds was a serious difficulty,
but by the kind intervention of the Queen we were able to
collect a number from houses in the town, whilst Her Majesty
herself gave us twenty first-class beds with box-spring
mattresses. Later on we got our