I cannot help feeling that in the trenches, right along the line where the surgical men are working, there is just the same problem to deal with as we encountered in those early days of mission effort in the trawling fleets. Very great difficulties had to be overcome in performing operations in tiny mission hospital smacks on the open sea far from land; just as unusual obstacles have to be surmounted in treating wounded fighting men at the front to-day. The problem in the North Sea was to heal men’s bodies, as well as to help them to take a higher view of life; and it seems to me that the problem at the front is just the same. In dealing with the body there have been preventive developments which are little short of marvellous. The history of war is not the history of wounds, as a rule it has been the history of disease; and speaking as an unbiassed person I think that in this connection we are doing a perfectly magnificent work. First of all, the troubles of the trench fighting have been the gas bacillus, which is an animal bacillus, and the tetanus bacillus. Both began operations in this war with terrible results, but now they have scarcely any effect. It must be remembered that the soil in France and Flanders, where so much of the fighting has taken place, is highly cultivated, and is therefore splendid breeding-ground for these deadly bacilli. So much is this the case with tetanus that in the early stages of the war bits of uniform which have been driven into the body, however slightly, were infinitely more dangerous than serious wounds caused by clean shrapnel, for the cloth, by contact with the soil, had become infected with the bacillus. I have seen men with pieces of shrapnel left in their wounds and doing well, but a piece of uniform, sodden with the rich soil, was a very different thing. But so wonderful has been the advance in the method of treating tetanus that to-day, if taken in time, such a thing as a fatal result is extremely improbable. Every soldier is so quickly and skilfully treated that danger practically does not exist. The very terrible gas bacillus caused another very common disease, for the gas produced a kind of gangrene; yet now there is very little mortality indeed from this cause. In the beginning, too, any number of men were lost from typhoid fever, but now typhoid is getting so rare that if a case occurs anywhere on the front it is known the same night at the French General Headquarters. That remark applies to the whole of our armies, and so rigid is the control which is kept over these matters that, on the day following the report, a searching local inquiry is held as to the cause of the disease.