The quietest members of the mess are the surgical specialists, P---- and R----. They are also the hardest worked and the most irregular at meals. It is rarely that they are taking their soup before the others have finished. This is perhaps a good thing, in the light of their frank physiological discussion at table of cases just disposed of in the theatre. On taking-in day they frequently do not come to table at all. I doubt whether they eat; if they do, it is a snack between cases in the _abattoir_. The hospital takes in and evacuates on alternate days. Theatre cases must be done at once, for it may be necessary to evacuate them to the base on the following day; it is, in fact, necessary, unless they are unable to bear transportation, and many are too critical for that--head cases, spinal cases, and the like. Cases that suffer greatly are visited with the merciful hypodermic before they start on their jolting journey in the ambulance-train. Not that A.T.'s are rough: they're amazingly smooth. But however smooth, they are agonising to the man whose nerves are lacerated and exposed, or into whose tissue the scalpel has cut deep. The A.T. draws into an improvised siding adjacent to the wards. There is no question of mechanical transport to the train. It is the practice to establish C.C.S.'s beside a railway, where evacuation during a push can be facile and expeditious. P---- and R----, the men of few words, but of great and bloody deeds, have operated in some degree or other on wellnigh every case that boards the ambulance-train. Added to the shortages in fuel which hit the wounded so hard is that other present hardship: the congestion on railways. As soon as an A.T. is wired as having left the Army garage at ----, such preparations must be made as will ensure that the wounded will be ready to board her immediately on her arrival. They must be waiting in the evacuation tents by the siding before the minimum time of her arrival. But notwithstanding regulations which provide that A.T.'s shall take precedence over all other railway-traffic whatsoever, that requisitioned is frequently four or five hours late--such is the present state of the roads. That means four hours of frozen agony in the evacuation tents. Fuel cannot be spared for warming them, when it is more than the wards can do to get warmed. A shivering padré moves round amongst them administering comfort which makes no pretence at being spiritual, except in a punning sense. That's one thing very few padrés in the war-zone have been obtuse enough not to learn: that attempts at spiritual consolation may sometimes be inopportune. Every padré knows the full war-value of creature-comforts--even for his spiritual ends. So he moves about the evacuation tent ministering to the body rather than to the soul. The surgical specialists have long since ceased to have connection with this stage of their patients' movements basewards. They are in the theatre making ready more for the journey down.