Do not think that these conditions are due to carelessness; they are caused by the national bankruptcy. Hungary's exchequer has been pillaged by both Bolshevists and Roumanians. In the money that is left a depreciation has taken place which would be equalled in American currency if the spending value of the dollar were to become less than that of one cent. Moreover, very many medical requirements have become absolutely unobtainable. Commodities so common as soap, powder, vaseline, linen are not to be purchased. The children born in the hospital are wrapped in paper. Even paper is so scarce that it has to be washed. After it has been washed it cracks. Its edges become sharp as a razor. There is not a baby in that hospital whose tender little body is not covered with cuts and sores. Yet what can the nurses do? Babies have to be clad. There is nothing but paper. I wish the people who read this chapter could have accompanied me through those wards. It was the Christmas season. The occupants of the cots were little children; the mothers who bent over them, giving them the last of their strength, were more outcast than Mary. Because of the coal shortage, no ward in the hospital was properly heated. I was wearing a coat and had to keep it on. In the little railed beds, the babies shivered against the bars on bare mattresses. They wore nothing but a single patched shirt, which left off at the legs for the sake of economy. The impression they created was not even remotely human; they looked like sick monkeys from the tropics who had not became acclimatised. There were lines and lines of them, their bodies blue with cold and criss-crossed with scars. Most of them could not shift themselves; their heads were bumpy and their legs withered. The thing that first struck me was their silence; they had finished all their crying. The doctor informed me that the mortality among them is over thirty per cent. Their ages were anything from the newly born to ten years old. It seemed that into those buildings was crowded the child misery of all the world. I stopped to enquire who were their parents. They did not know. Their fathers had been killed in the war and their mothers had died. Some of them had been picked up in the streets where they had been abandoned by parents who could drag no further. I found myself in the maternity ward. The women were as naked as the children. Of the old stock of gowns only a few were left, which had been patched and darned till there remained scarcely anything of the original fabric. Again, as in the case of the children, the mattresses were bare of coverings. The napkins of the new-born babies were of paper, broken and washed to shreds. And this was the hospital which for mercy once led the world!