She scrutinised it closely. It puzzled her, though her bewilderment was nothing to the astonishment which that prescription would have excited in a member of the medical profession. "Fank you," said Barbara, who was no less pleased than puzzled, and who tried to look as if she quite understood. Her little face, with its halo of golden curls, was turned up to mine, and she now regarded me with a respect for my professional attainments which was truly gratifying. I was transcribing a temperature-chart for Barbara's patient when a tactless messenger came to say that my car was at the door. Barbara hung on my arm. "Will you come again, and take his tempewature--Pwomise?" I promised. XIX AN ARMY COUNCIL (_October 1914_) All the morning I had travelled through the pleasant valleys of Normandy between chalk-hills crowned with russet beeches. The country had the delicacy of one of Corot's landscapes, and the skies were of that unforgettable blue which is the secret of France. The end of my journey found me at No. ---- General Hospital. The chaplain, an old C.F. attached to the Base Hospitals, who had rejoined on the outbreak of the war, and myself were the centre of a group of convalescents. They wore the regulation uniform of loose sky-blue flannels, resembling a fitter's overalls in everything except the extreme brilliance of the dye, with red ties tied in a sailor's knot. The badges on their caps alone betrayed their regiments. There were "details" from almost every regiment in the British Army, and one could hear every dialect from John o' Groat's to Land's End. Their talk was of the great retreat. "Hell it was--fire and brimstone," said a R.F.A. man. "We limbered up, our battery did, and got the guns off in column of route, but we were more like a blooming ambulance than a battery. We had our limbers and waggons chock full o' details--fellers who'd been wounded or crocked up. And reservists wi' sore feet--out o' training, I reckon," he added magisterially. "Never you mind about resarvists, my son," interjected a man in the Suffolks. "We resarvists carried some of the recroots on our backs for miles. We ain't no chickens." "No, that we bain't," said a West-countryman. "I reckon we can teach them young fellers zummat. Oi zeed zome on 'em pretty clytenish[13] when they was under foire the fust time. Though they were middlin' steady, arterwards," he added indulgently as though jealous of the honour of his regiment. "'Twere all a duddering[14] mix-up. I niver a zeed anything loike it afore. Wimmen an' childer a-runnin' in and out among us like poultry; we could'n keep sections o' fours nohow. We carried some o' the little 'uns. And girt fires a-burnin' at night loike ricks--a terrible blissey[15] on the hills. And 'twere that dusty and hot oi did get mortal drouthy in my drawt and a niver had a drop in my water-bottle; I'd gied it all to the childer." "What about rations?" said the chaplain.