nd, set up the song, already familiar in the Midlands, "Keep the home
fires burning till the boys come home."

In the village where they stopped, some forty miles from the actual front,
a special messenger from the general headquarters brings the amazing news
that General Headquarters invites Mrs. Ward and her daughter for two days,
and will send a motor for them, if they accept, which, of course, they did
upon the instant, looking forward with eagerness to the great mysteries of
the front, its camps, its men, and its hospitals, that they were to see
with their own eyes to-morrow.

The remainder of the day before they are to start for the front suffices
for the visit to a camp set down in one of the pleasantest spots in
France, a favorite haunt of French artists before the war, now occupied by
a British reinforcement camp, the trees having all been cut away, by long
lines of hospitals, by a convalescent depot, and by the training grounds,
to which we have already referred.

I must copy the bare catalogue of what this vast camp contained: "Sleeping
and mess quarters for those belonging to the new armies; sixteen hospitals
with twenty-one thousand beds" (and this shows now what it was to be near
the front); "rifle ranges; training camps; a vast laundry, worked by
French women under British organization, which washes for all the
hospitals thirty thousand pieces a day; recreation huts of every possible
kind; a cinema theatre seating eight hundred men, with performances twice
a day; nurses clubs; officers clubs; a supply depot for food; an ordnance
depot for everything that is not food; railroad sidings on which every
kind of man and thing can go out and come in without interruption; a
convalescents' depot of two thousand patients; and a convalescent horse
depot of two thousand horses; all this in one camp, established since last
April."

Ah! But the deepest impression left on the minds of our ladies is of the
terrible sufferings in the hospitals, of the smiling endurance with which
they were borne, of the timely skill, pity, and devotion of the doctors
and nurses, taking care of the twenty thousand wounded. Realizing the
sympathy of America with all these scenes and sufferings, they do not fail
to note the hospitals organized by the Universities of Chicago and of
Harvard, staffed by American sisters and doctors, each providing
thirty-four doctors and eighty nurses, and dealing with a thousand
patients, and a convalescent