If it were possible, I should say something here which would be fitting and adequate about the English women who nursed the twenty-five hundred wounded men in General Hospital No. 5, at Rouen. But that power isn’t given me. All I can do is to fall back upon our most profound American expression of respect and say that my hat is off to them. One nurse in the ward in which I lay had been on her feet for fifty-six hours, with hardly time even to eat. She finally fainted from exhaustion, was carried out of the ward, and was back again in four hours, assisting at an operation. And the doctors were doing their bit, too, in living up to the obligations which they considered to be theirs. An operating room was in every ward with five tables in each. After the fight on the Somme, in which I was wounded, not a table was vacant any hour in the twenty-four, for days at a time. Outside of each room was a long line of stretchers containing patients next awaiting surgical attention. And in all that stress, I did not hear one word of complaint from the surgeons who stood, hour after hour, using their skill and training for the petty pay of English army medical officers. On December 5th, I was told I was well enough to be sent to England and, on the next day, I went on a hospital train from Rouen to Havre. Here I was placed on a hospital ship which every medical officer in our army ought to have a chance to inspect. Nothing ingenuity could contrive for convenience and comfort was missing. Patients were sent below decks in elevators, and then placed in swinging cradles which hung level no matter what the ship’s motion might be. As soon as I had been made comfortable in my particular cradle, I was given a box which had engraved upon it: “Presented with the compliments of the Union Castle Line. May you have a speedy and good recovery.” The box contained cigarettes, tobacco, and a pipe. When the ship docked at Southampton, after a run of eight hours across channel, each patient was asked what part of the British Isles he would like to be taken to for the period of his convalescence. I requested to be taken to London, where, I thought, there was the best chance of my seeing Americans who might know me. Say, I sure made a good guess. I didn’t know many Americans, but I didn’t need to know them. They found me and made themselves acquainted. They brought things, and then they went out to get more they had forgotten to bring the first trip. The second day after I had been installed on a cot in the King George Hospital, in London, I sent fifteen hundred cigarettes back to the boys of our battalion in France out of my surplus stock. If I had undertaken to eat and drink and smoke all the things that were brought to me by Americans, just because I was an American, I’d be back in that hospital now, only getting fairly started on the job. It’s some country when you need it.