cafe
with our new friends and met many old ones. The local chemist cheered
and promised us a present of mackintosh cotton to celebrate our return.
We had spent Easter morning in his shop eating purple eggs and drinking
tea enlivened with brandy, while the choir came in and chanted beautiful
Easter songs to us.

An hour rolled by, the cafe closed, our friends disappeared. We went to
meet the carriages from the station; at last they arrived, with Mr. Owen
half asleep amidst the kitbags.

It was far into the night when we arrived at our hospital burdened with
our two bags and the copper tray.

The night nurse, a kitten, and a round woolly puppy welcomed us.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER XIV

MAINLY RETROSPECTIVE

Hospital work again. How strange we felt. A sad-faced little Serbian
lady, widowed through typhus, was interpreting for the out-patients
while Jo was away; but she was alone in the world and did not want to
go--so Jo, homesick for her beloved out-patients, had to make the best
of it and do other work. The Serbian youth who had been put on the staff
as secretary, was dangerously ill with typhoid fever, which he had
picked up at Kragujevatz. The typhus barrack was a children's hospital,
containing little waifs chosen from the out-patients, and a few women.

In the early days when we had first arrived at Vrntze there were several
overfilled Serbian and one Greek hospital. They were only cafes and
large villas, unsanitary, stuffy, and overworked. The windows were never
open, and through the huge sheets of plate glass could be dimly seen in
the thick blue tobacco smoke a higgledy-piggledy crowd of beds. Often
two men lay in one bed covered with their dirty great coats, while
typhus patients and wounded men slept together. One man lay unconscious
for several days in the window, his feet in his dinner-plate. At last he
died, his feet still in the dinner. Mr. Berry took on a hydropathic
establishment which had been completed just before the first Balkan War.
This was used as the central hospital, where the staff lodged, and the
most serious surgical cases were nursed. In the basement an
operating-room was rigged up, there were bathrooms, disinfecting-rooms,
a laundry, and an engine-house, where gimcrack German machinery in fits
and starts provided us with electric light and hot water. The village
school on the hill opposite was annexed and cleaned by a sculptor, a
singer, a painter, and a judge of the Royal