The stationary hospital is a township, downright, with canvas blocks and a main street and side-roads. Hospital _marquees_ of the larger sort always convey a sense of permanency. But when pitched in such numbers and with a view to such a lengthy sojourn as these Lemnian hospitals anticipated, they gave an impression of stability not ordinarily associated with even a base. The huts of the Sisters' quarters, dental huts, canteen shacks, X-ray huts, and so forth, deepened the impression. And the furnishings took nothing from it: the matting, the iron beds, the chairs and lounges, the lockers, tables, medicine-chests. The blue suits of convalescents were in sympathy, too, though they smacked rather of the permanence of the penitentiary. And the traffic in the motor-lorries sometimes added the _quasi_-roar of street traffic. The Sisters entertained friends at tea in their recreation-tent--a luxurious red and yellow snuggery, one of the largest _marquees_, furnished in a way quite adequate to the tone of a vice-regal garden-party. Distinctions in rank were deleted. Privates, and officers of the General Staff, hobnobbed as though in mufti. The recreation-tent was a great leveller; there a sergeant presumed with impunity to argue the point with a Colonel from Headquarters. It was the most democratic assembly active-service had yet produced. The common bond may have been the dainty afternoon-tea--the fine china; the tiny sandwiches, furnishing half an active-service mouthful; the fine linen of the table-cover; the gentle tones of the hostess's voice: all these were as unaccustomed to the Brigadier-General as to the Private on the Peninsula. There was here the sweet half-delusion of a tea-party at home, which broke down, for a couple of hours, barriers of rank. You can conceive the exquisite contrast of the whole thing (you who rail at afternoon-tea conventions--deliciously absent here, though!) with the enforced boorish ruggedness of Anzac. And there was the walk after along the ridge of the Peninsula on which the hospital lay, commanding the fine harbour both ways: on the south bulwarked by precipitous hills rising sheer as from a Scottish lake, and to the north checked by the gentle slopes of that rich-hued country, volcanic to the core, from which the afternoon sun drew out the warm, unnatural colour; and the purple of the peaks lay beyond by the seaboard. "Is there a war on?" The question recurred again and again, audibly, and was answered, not by the company, but by the blue-clothed figures hobbling painfully upon the broad road or lying helplessly in the warm December sun.