Médaille Militaire, and the cross of the Legion. And a very large number of our men had won medals.

In those days of stress the wounded were picked up and sent indiscriminately to our hospital. We had several German soldiers, and a German lieutenant. On the whole the German private soldiers were plucky enough, though one, of an incredibly low type of countenance, shocked us with his lack of pluck, his animal intolerance of pain, and his animal desire to bite the thing that came nearest. But the officer behaved like a coward. One hesitates to describe any badly wounded man thus. Still, judged not only by the standard of French courageadmittedly a high one-but by that of his own German "cannon fodder," the man was cowardly. His shrieks and yells of fear, his complete lack of control when in pain, were an outrage to the humanity of all those wounded Frenchmen, and the wounded men of his own race. He complained of his treatment, and was abusive to his nurse. Being very ill, an officer, and a German who played the coward to boot, with whom one could not ask French officers to share a ward, he had to have a room to himself (vacated for him, as it happened, by the very nurse whom he designated by that choice Teutonie epithet of "Sohwein"), which necessitated special treatment and considerable extra work. One is proud that the French practice is to make no sort of dif

ference between the wounded, whether Frenchmen or enemies; but when such an one as the Herr Lieutenant D claims more attention than even our own officers obtained, one wonders bitterly what sort of treatment is being meted out to our men in German hands-the hands of men who can turn machine-guns from aeroplanes on fleeing refugees, drop bombs on hospitals, and deliberately torpedo a hospital ship full of helpless wounded men. All that Herr Lieutenant D- legitimately had to complain of was that his own side's aeroplanes, bombing the neighbouring village, disturbed his rest at night.

Do people at home realise, I wonder, what aerial warfare in France has become? Almost nightly at that period the German machines dashed across the lines and methodically bombed towns and villages-and indeed fields and woods occasionally! They interfered considerably with our work, for we dared not show a light when they were about: they had bombed a hospital within twenty kilometres of us one night when they were working late and the lights showed from the hut windows, and had killed a number of wounded and their military male nurses. It was impossible adequately to darken our vast ecclesiastical windows, hence we had to put out all lights in the corridors, halls, and stairways. Imagine an inky dark corridor full of stretchers of newly woundedmore stretchers being carried

up pitoh-dark stairways from unloading ambulances: more stretchers being carried out of theatres with unconscious men on them-the groping in the dark, with the noise of the guns all round, and then the shattering orash and dull quaking of a bomb! And in one of the huge wards-a vast building in which one could place a parish church, with as many lofty windows-and in the half-open cloisters, nurses groping about in the dark, and men beginning to hæmorrhage. Yet a bare light would have invited a bomb, the German aviator being what he is. I have seen one of their leuchtbombs suspended in air, lighting up the surrounding country in its evil reddish glow, while the bombs were dropped on a village near us; and later, the poor village victims have been brought in, frightfully injured, those who had not been killed outright. French houses have good cellars, but these villagers had been taken unawares in their beds. The tired working woman does not hear the slow measured throb of the Boche engine approaching-a sound most sinister, that is warranted to wake most of us who have been in hospitals within the raided back areas. An occasional visit by day, with the leisured firing of a gun or two, and the little white puffs of shrapnel smoke in a blue sky, is an interesting incident. The intruder is probably seeking to take photographs; but the bombing by night, night after night, when from a crowded hospital full of helpless men

one hears that sinister sound beating nearer and nearer, with the sure knowledge that death and destruction are in store for some hapless mortal somewhere, is horrible. The gross barking of the vulgar Bertha, as you hear the boom of discharge away over the lines, and a second or two later the crash of the explosion out Paris way, is nothing to it: one knows that very few of Bertha's shells do any harm. The air squadrons are a real danger and a very present terror.

A young American sergeant in the French Flying Service, a pilot of a very famous squadron reminiscent of Franco - American friendship in days gone by, was brought to us wounded. He had attacked four German machines, and had been brought down between the lines. One of his opponents swooped low and put a machine-gun bullet into his leg as he lay there among the wreckage of his aeroplane. A Frenchman brought him in and carried him to a Poste de Secours, and he was put in an ambulance and sent to us. For a long time he seemed to be doing well once the badly-smashed leg had been amputated, but other internal damage caused by the fall declared itself, and he died in the middle of a startlingly sudden and furious aerial storm that died down as unexpectedly as it arose. His death brought home to us the new and indissoluble bond of fellowship between the three principal Allies fighting on the Western

During the early days of July the work had slackened slightly, though the hospital was still uncomfortably full, and the daily operation list often carried us into the night. On July 14 we waited with bated breath-surely the German mind could not resist renewing the offensive on France's great festival of freedom. And nothing happened — nothing but a constant stream of monster guns and companies of little tanks tooling merrily along the roads towards the Forest of Villers Cotterets. Their meaning we only learned on the 18th! At 5 A.M. on the 15th we heard the voice of gross Bertha recommencing as we had heard it on May 27. "The Offensive has begun," we said, and hoped that we were wrong, for we were all tired out. It had begun, and we were a little perturbed at the news. And then, three days later, our ambulances were telephoned for, and a stream of almost deliriously exultant wounded came in proclaiming the fact that we had attacked, successfully, at Villers Cotterets. Still we only thought it was a counterattack, a distraction on the enemy flank. But the wounded streamed in, numbers of splendid young Americans among them, and always with news of further progress. Our tiredout staff was hardly able to

on its energies, but the glad news of a real big blow, Fooh's counter-offensive at last, so heartened us that it put new life into us. And simultaneously came the news that at the request of the Grand Quartier General itself our hospital had been taken over by the Army Administration from the French Red Cross Society, which during the past three and a half years had merely lent us to the army which happened to occupy our sector of the Front and its corresponding back area. This was a compliment. But to be nursing General Mangin's magnificent troops was a privilege.

This time I felt I could watch the hospital effort at a distance (comparatively speaking), for the long exposures to the X-ray which I had been unable to avoid during the May-June offensive had resulted in my having to give up work in the examining room and come right out of the rays.

Others had taken my place, having providentially appeared at the right moment, as so often happens in oritical situations; and in the comparative peace of the Dark Room, developing the plates for my erstwhile assistant, I could think it all over. The thought that amused me most was my own settled conviotion of a few months back that the great work of our hospital had culminated in the first battle of the Somme, and that after the merely useful routine work of 1917 we should never again be called upon to