d take all the
afternoon to visit every ward, and they are all much alike--but there
is the mad ward if you'd care to see that? This way."

A strange place, this, divided into compartments or cubicles where
were many patients in the familiar blue overalls, most of whom rose
and stood at attention as we entered. Tall, soldierly figures they
seemed, and yet with an indefinable something in their looks--a
vagueness of gaze, a loose-lipped, too-ready smile, a vacancy of
expression. Some there were who scowled sullenly enough, others who
sat crouched apart, solitary souls, who, I learned, felt themselves
outcast; others again crouched in corners haunted by the dread of a
pursuing vengeance always at hand.

One such the Colonel accosted, asking what was wrong. The man looked
up, looked down and muttered unintelligibly, whereupon the Sister
spoke.

"He believes that every one thinks him a spy," she explained, and
touched the man's bowed head with a hand as gentle as her voice.

"Shell-shock is a strange thing," said the Colonel-Surgeon, "and
affects men in many extraordinary ways, but seldom permanently."

"You mean that those poor fellows will recover?" I asked.

"Quite ninety per cent," he answered in his quiet, assured voice.

I was shown over laundries complete in every detail; I walked through
clothing stores where, in a single day, six hundred men had been
equipped from head to foot; I beheld large machines for the
sterilisation of garments foul with the grime of battle and other
things.

Truly, here, within the hospital that had grown, mushroom-like,
within the wild, was everything for the alleviation of hurts and
suffering more awful than our fighting ancestors ever had to endure.
Presently I left this place, but now, although a clean, fresh wind
blew and the setting sun peeped out, the world somehow seemed a
grimmer place than ever.

In the Dark Ages, humanity endured much of sin and shame and
suffering, but never such as in this age of Reason and Culture. This
same earth has known evils of every kind, has heard the screams of
outraged innocence, the groan of tortured flesh, and has reddened
beneath the heel of Tyranny; this same sun has seen the smoke and
ravishment of cities and been darkened by the hateful mists of
war--but never such a war as this of cultured barbarity with all its
new devilishness. Shell-shock and insanity, poison gas and slow
strangulation, liquid fire and poison shells. Rape, Murder