This is not an isolated case, nor an exaggerated one. There are things I do not care to publish. Three hundred and more such hospitals are known. The French Government pays, or will pay, twenty-five cents a day to keep these men. Black bread and _pot-à-feu_ is all that can be managed on that amount. Convalescents sit up in bed and painfully unravel their tattered socks for wool. They tie the bits together, often two or three inches in length, and knit new feet in old socks, or--when they secure enough--new socks. For the Germans hold the wool cities of France. Ordinarily worsted costs eighteen and nineteen francs in Dinard and Saint Malo, or from three dollars and sixty cents to three dollars and eighty cents a pound. Much of the government reserves of woollen underwear for the soldiers was in the captured towns, and German prisoners have been found wearing woollens with the French Government stamp. Every sort of building is being used for these isolated hospitals--garages, town halls, private dwellings, schools. At first they had no chloroform, no instruments. There are cases on record where automobile tools were used in emergency, kitchen knives, saws, anything. In one case, last spring, two hundred convalescents, leaving one of these hospitals on a cold day in March, were called back, on the arrival of a hundred freshly wounded men, that every superfluous bandage on their wounds might be removed, to be used again. Naturally, depending entirely on the unskilled nursing of the village women, much that we regard as fundamental in hospital practice is ignored. Wounded men, typhoid and scarlet fever cases are found in the same wards. In one isolated town a single clinical thermometer is obliged to serve for sixty typhoid and scarlet fever patients.[F] [Footnote F: Written in June, 1915.] Sometimes the men in these isolated and ill-equipped refuges realise the horror and hopelessness of their situation. The nights are particularly bad. Any one who knows hospitals well, knows the night terrors of the wards; knows, too, the contagion of excitement that proceeds from a hysterical or delirious patient. In some of these lonely hospitals hell breaks loose at night. The peasant women must sleep. Even the tireless nuns cannot labour forever without rest. The men have come from battlefields of infinite horror. A frenzied dream, a delirious soldier calling them to the charge, and panic rages. To offset these horrors of the night the peasants have, here and there, resorted to music. It is naïve, pathetic. Where there is a piano it is moved into the school, or garage, or whatever the building may be, and at twilight a nun or a volunteer musician plays quietly, to soothe the men to sleep. In one or two towns a village band, or perhaps a lone cornetist, plays in the street outside. So the days go on, and the nights. Supplies are begged for and do not always come. Dressings are washed, to be used again and again.