We all physically were so hard pushed Major Murphy wired for help, and just a day before this lull we received a mobile Unit from the A. E. F., fifteen nurses and thirty-odd enlisted men. You may be sure we were glad to get them, though fifteen nurses were just lost in the shuffle and did not seem to make the slightest difference. They all were very young, inexperienced, little things from Kentucky, who had only recently landed and had not seen a patient since they had been over. Some of them are only twenty-one (the age limit has been lowered; it was twenty-five when we left) and have only been out of a training-school a very short time, and had only been in very small Kentucky hospitals. So it seemed a heart-breaking thing to thrust them into this unbelievable hell of a hospital. Such a baptism of fire as they got that first afternoon! I tried to prepare them all I could, but no words could convey anything like the reality to their inexperienced minds. It was pouring when they came at 12:30 A.M. (and me to meet them here, and feed them, and find them a place to sleep with a half-hour’s notice of their coming!) and it was pouring rain the next afternoon when the Supervisor started off with the little rubber-coated-and-hatted group to drop one here and another there according to assignments we had made here in the office. A little later I had occasion to go down in the lines, and I looked in one of the huts just to see what the little new thing looked like. Just before I got to the hut a little procession had come out of the door. First two of our men carrying a stretcher covered with a Union Jack, then a second stretcher also covered by a flag, then our Supervisor walking behind accompanying them to the mortuary. People along the line stood rigidly at attention as they passed, and saluted. Then I went into the hut. The odor that hit me as I entered was terrific, for most of the cases in this hut have penetrating chest wounds which drain. The little nurse was standing by the stove stirring something in a cup on it with a spoon. She was green-white and looked utterly nauseated. I did not dare speak to her, for fear she would lose any control she had left, so I told the weary head nurse to be as gentle with the little thing as she could and try to realize what she was going through. That evening I spoke to their group for about ten minutes and told them that it was not going to be like this always, and about the mitigations and the happy part of it all. Then I asked them if, after all, this was not what they had come for, and weren’t they glad they were here. A most sincere response made me feel that they would be all right soon. Like all young things, they are adjusting wonderfully and are already making themselves felt, and are going about as chipper and happy as monkeys. But oh, the poor little dears, they will never forget that first day.