ON A POSTCARD.
IN Paris, ten days ago, on my way to visit the Urgency Cases Hospital at Bar-le-Due, I came across a picture- postcard, made in Italy. Biprodusione vietata, says the post- card, with decent pride: I may only describe it, not reproduce it. It is one of a series. In each of them, the nations are represented as little children: the Allies are good little children, mighty serious, thick-set, wide-eyed babes : and Germany and Austria are naughty little children, whom the Allies upset or pelt or duck in the Yser. On the postcard which seized my fancy, the naughty children are the two thieves who were crucified, one on the right hand, the other on the left: and the good children are mocking them. The central cross is there ; but that is gone, which was on it, Dieu lee abandonne, says the postcard: and the inscription is written also in Italian over them, Dio non b piie eon fora. The ;hop where I found this amazing postcard, this fierce prophecy of the war, had laid itself out to please me with all that is commonly called " suggestive." I am glad that I caught sight of the best thing in the shop. Then we went on to Bar-le-Duo, where we found little children, real children, playing marbles with shrapnel bullets : whereof I bought three for half-a-franc, and have them here, along with other objets d'actualito, scraps and shards and mascots. But I found no object of actuality more delightful than the Hospital itself.
Founded by an English lady, and accepted and favoured by the French Government, it serves for one hundred French wounded, all of them severe cases: mostly shell or shrapnel wounds, grave all of them, and almost all of them septic. They come from Bagatelle, Clermont, Ste. Menehould, by the train des bleeds, and by motor-ambulances. The hospital wards form one block of the great Hopital Central : thus, French and English surgeons, nurses, and orderlies are neighbours together. Bat the French take medical cases, as well as surgical : and the Urgency Canes Hospital has to be always on guard against infection. Many other difficulties attend its work especially, it needs a better kitchen, and two more motor-ambulances, and a proper supply of hot water in the wards. I am permitted, as Chairman of the Hospital, to beg for it. The work is uphill: it is grievously hindered by want of the ordinary conveniences for cooking and washing and beating : and, for all that, it is finely done, and has been the saving of many lives. Here in our placid London hospitals, so many cases are trivial: there, every case ie grave: I saw wounds such as we do not see here. And I pray the readers of this to send their donations to the Hon. Secretary, 50A Curzon Street, W. It is no easy matter to cook for one hundred and fifty, with a kitchen hardly adequate for fifty; and to provide all necessary lamentations, with nothing but kettles on coke-stoves; and to ensure, without enough motor-ambulances, the quick transport of patients. These faults must be mended before the Urgency Cases Hospital can be all that it ought to be. But the work of the surgeons and the nurses is admirable; and they have slammed the door in Death's face again and again: I saw them doing it.
Of the patients, I have to say that their injuries, many of them, are downright terrible : but I think that the wounded obtain from fatigue some immunity against pain. The dressing of such extensive wounds is sometimes painful; but no patient was in prolonged pain: and Heaven be praised for morphia, and for tobacco. Sleep, to these worn-out men, came with accumulated authority, with long arrears owing to them. I think that they had gone through too much to be
"cheery," or to care to be amused with gramophones and such- like. Sleep occupied them : and they slept for hours in the open air—those who could be allowed there—on some old hammock-chairs: and when they woke, they sunned them- selves to sleep again. A little party of convalescents, whom departure I saw one morning, had a fine send-off : it was pleasant to note the goodwill between them and their English friends. Of a Sunday morning, the cur6 of St. Millie' says Mass in the receiving-tent, at an altar of packing-cases: and some of the wounded are laid on stretchers near the altar. Music comes rarely to the Hospital, but is good when it comes: some of the French soldiers had found a set of band-instru- ments in a deserted village, and had rehearsed some national airs for the love of the thing ; and I have heard "God Save the Ring" sound grander, but I never beard it sound sweeter it was well set in the open air, with a crowd of French acid English surgeons and nurses and orderlies, and many patients: all in sunshine, with a background of hillside and orchards. Indeed, Bar-le-Duo has beautiful country allround it. The Forest of the Argonne, now, as Mr. Brooke would hays said: I had thought of it as a dismal place; and it is a dreamland, where you can gather an armful of lilies-of-the. valley. The war came, last autumn, very aloes to Har-le- Due : we saw its handiwork, the ruins which a year ago were Vassineourt, Sermaise, Millersaux-Vents, Clermont and we visited the clearing-hospitals at Lee Islettes and Clermont. which send patients to the Urgency Cases Hospital and at Clermont we could hear the guns, and see the smoke of the shells. Even at Bar-le-Duo, some thirty miles from the firing, the sound of the guns may be beard, promising to send mots patients to the Hospital : we saw, at the clearing-hospitals, the fall significance of that promise.
Some of the medical cases, whom we saw at Les Ialettes and at Bar-le-Duo railway station, seemed worse off than the wounded. The daily train des blesses—it has La Revanche. 1870-1914, on the name-plate of its engine—sets down a very pitiable little group, some wounded, others half wrecked by typhoid, or by disease of the heart or of the lungs and there are not enough stretchers and bearers for all of them. It I. not easy, here at home, to comprehend the greatness of the preventive and protective sanitary and medical work done for our men. Years hence, when we shall be able to read in fell the medical and surgical history of our Army in this war, we shall see better what great things the doctors accomplished: but no amount of reading will be more eloquent than Kr. Tennant's recent statement that ninety per cent. of our Expeditionary Force, who were protected, had only ten deaths from typhoid; while ten per cent., who were not protected, had one hundred deaths from typhoid. And that is only OM point in the wide and splendid work of the Army Medical Service.
There is no room to tell of the goodwill of Bar-le-Dee toward the Hospital, and toward us English. Even in Paris I had a most unfamiliar sense that I was acceptable, and well-nigh attractive. We got into London on the wings of the news of the sinking of the 'Lusitania.' That is just what my postcard said: Dieu les °bandanna. The central cross, if it were not already bare, is bare now. Time, and the French military authorities, will decide whether the Hospital shall stay where it is, or shall follow the advance of the French. Meanwhile, it sets itself to the saving of precious lives and I hope that it will always receive, as it deserves, a very
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