On entering the gates, the first sight to attract us had been a
colony of roughly-built bungalows scattered over the miry slopes of
a little park adjoining the railway station, and surmounted by the
sign: "Evacuation Hospital No. 6." The next morning we went to visit
it. A part of the station buildings has been adapted to hospital
use, and among them a great roofless hall, which the surgeon in
charge has covered in with canvas and divided down its length into a
double row of tents. Each tent contains two wooden cots,
scrupulously clean and raised high above the floor; and the immense
ward is warmed by a row of stoves down the central passage. In the
bungalows across the road are beds for the patients who are to be
kept for a time before being transferred to the hospitals in the
town. In one bungalow an operating-room has been installed, in
another are the bathing arrangements for the newcomers from the
trenches. Every possible device for the relief of the wounded has
been carefully thought out and intelligently applied by the surgeon
in charge and the _infirmiere major_ who indefatigably seconds him.
Evacuation Hospital No. 6 sprang up in an hour, almost, on the
dreadful August day when four thousand wounded lay on stretchers
between the railway station and the gate of the little park across
the way; and it has gradually grown into the model of what such a
hospital may become in skilful and devoted hands.

Verdun has other excellent hospitals for the care of the severely
wounded who cannot be sent farther from the front. Among them St.
Nicolas, in a big airy building on the Meuse, is an example of a
great French Military Hospital at its best; but I visited few
others, for the main object of my journey was to get to some of the
second-line ambulances beyond the town. The first we went to was in
a small village to the north of Verdun, not far from the enemy's
lines at Cosenvoye, and was fairly representative of all the others.
The dreary muddy village was crammed with troops, and the ambulance
had been installed at haphazard in such houses as the military
authorities could spare. The arrangements were primitive but clean,
and even the dentist had set up his apparatus in one of the rooms.
The men lay on mattresses or in wooden cots, and the rooms were
heated by stoves. The great need, here as everywhere, was for
blankets and clean underclothing; for the wounded are brought in
from the front encrusted with frozen mud,