A French interpreter was attached to the hospital. He was a man of forty-five, with the heart of a boy of fifteen. He would sit at the gramaphone by the hour, playing his favourite music and staring into vacancy. His favourites were: a minuet of Haydn, Beethoven's Minuet in G, selections from the 1812 Overture, the Overture to _Mignon_, and the Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy. Everyone "pulled his leg"; everyone liked him--he was so gentle of heart, but so baffling in repartee. They called him the _Pawkie Duke_, a name that came to him through his comments when the facetious song of that title in the "St. Andrew's Song-Book" was being sung. He lived in a hut in hospital. Part of his duty consisted in mediation between the civilian sick and the English M.O.'s; for by international agreement they were due to treat any civilian sick who needed it. I first met Pawkie waiting in the anteroom of the operating-theatre with a distracted mother whose child was within under operation for appendicitis. She was a lovely girl of ten. The mother was weeping anxiously. Pawkie was almost in sympathetic tears himself. He made excursions of high frequency into the theatre to report progress to the mother. I went in. He came after, fumbling nervously with his hands and regarding the surgeons with a gaze of appeal. He would whisper to the Colonel, who reassured him. He tore out, colliding with the orderlies who were bearing in another "case." Seizing madame by the hands, he cried: "_Bien, madame! Elle va bien! La pauvre petite fille fait de bon progrès. Les chirurgiens-major sont très adroits. Le Capitaine est le chirurgien-spécialiste. Le Colonel assiste aussi. Ça ne fait rien, madame!_" And he left madame with the conviction that nothing could go wrong. But it was pathetic to see that beautiful child, her fair face smothered under the mask. At the end, when the wound was stitched, the surgeon took her up as gently as though she were his own offspring and carried her to her mother, and so on to the ward. There she stayed two weeks, tended by him with the affection of an elder brother. On the eve of the push, during the preparatory and retaliatory bombardment, the theatre was a ghastly chamber. An abbatoir it was, five hours after the arrival of the convoys, when the preparation of the cases for operation had been completed. Five "tables" were in continuous use. On "taking-in" night the surgeons invariably worked through to daylight. This is very exhausting, so exhausting that they never worked continuously. At about two o'clock they adjourned to the mess for a rest and a meal--a solid meal of bacon and eggs and coffee. For the push there came reinforcements--_teams_, as they were called. They amounted to eight fresh surgeons, ten Sisters, and fifty additional orderlies.