patient has the advantages of indoor comfort plus an outdoor
atmosphere. At the end of the ward a covered verandah is spacious enough
to take an extra couple of beds for those requiring completely open-air
treatment.

The ward proper has certain additions: a kitchen with gas-stove and
geyser; a sink-room with geyser and cleansing apparatus of special
pattern; a bathroom with geyser; lavatories; a small room for the
isolation of a patient on the danger-list; a linen-room; and cupboards.
All these are packed neatly under that one rectangular corrugated roof
which looked so ugly and so unpromising from outside.

Do not pity the wounded soldier because he is quartered in a "hut." The
word sounds unattractive. But if it is the right kind of hut, he is in
the soundest and most sanitary type of temporary hospital that the mind
of man has yet devised. The rain-drops may rattle a shade noisily on the
roof, the asbestos lining may be devoid of ornamentation, but as he
lies in bed and contemplates that unadorned ceiling he is a deal better
off than if he were gazing at the elaborate (and dust-harbouring)
cornices of the So-and-So Club's grandiose smoking-lounge in Pall Mall.

V

FROM THE "D" BLOCK WARDS

If you walk up the corridor at half-past four on certain afternoons of
the week you will meet a mob of patients trooping from their wards to
the concert-room. Being built of wood and corrugated iron, the corridor
is an echoing cave of noises. It echoes the tramp of feet--and
army-pattern boots were not soled for silence. It echoes the thud-thud
of crutches. It echoes the slurred rumble of wheeled chairs and
stretcher-trollies. But, above all, at half-past four on concert days it
echoes happy talk and chaff and boisterous laughter.

As often as not, the loudest talk, the cheeriest chaff, the most
spontaneous laughter, emanate from the blue-clad stalwarts who have
mustered from the "D" Block wards.

"D" Block contains the wards for eye-wound cases.

Here they come, a string of them, mostly with bandages round their
heads. The leading man owns one good eye--a twinkling eye--an eye of
mischief--an eye (you would guess at once) for the girls. (But the eye's
owner probably calls them the "pushers." Such is our language now.)
Behind him, in single file, and in step with him, march a gang of
patients each with his hand on the shoulder of the man in front. Tramp,
tramp! Their tread is purposely thunderous on the bare boar