The walking-cases are still splashing and dressing in the bathroom when the ambulances with the cot-cases begin to appear. Now is the orderlies' busy time. Each stretcher must be quickly but gently removed from the ambulance and carried into the receiving hall. Four orderlies haul the stretcher from its shelf in the ambulance; two orderlies then take its handles and carry it indoors. At the entrance to the receiving hall they halt. The Medical Officer bends over the patient, glances at the label which is attached to him, and assigns him to a ward. (Certain types of cases go to certain groups of wards.) The attendant sergeant promptly picks a metal ticket from a rack and lays it on the stretcher. The ticket has, punched on it, the number of the patient's ward and the number of the patient's bed in that ward. This ceremony completed, the orderlies proceed, with their burden, up the aisle between the beds in the receiving hall. Arrived at the bed, they lower their stretcher until it is at such a level that the patient, if he is active enough, can move off it on to the bed; if he is too weak to help himself he is lifted on to the bed by orderlies under the direction of the receiving-hall Sister. The stretcher is promptly removed and restored to its ambulance. If the patient is in an exceptionally suffering condition he is not placed on the receiving-hall bed; instead--the Medical Officer having given his permission--his stretcher is put on a wheeled trolley and he is taken straight away to his ward, so that he will only undergo one shift of position between the ambulance and his destination. The majority of stretcher-cases, however, reach us in a by no means desperate state, for, as I say, they seldom come to England without having been treated previously at a base abroad (except during the periods of heavy fighting). And it is remarkable how often the patient refuses help in getting off the stretcher on to the bed. He may be a cocoon of bandages, but he will courageously heave himself overboard, from stretcher to bed, with a gay _wallop_ which would be deemed rash even in a person in perfect health. Our receiving hall, at a big intake of wounded, when every bed bears its poor victim of the war, presents a spectacle which might give the philosopher food for thought; but I suspect that, if he regarded its actualities rather than his own preconceptions, what would impress him more than the sadness would be on the one hand the kindliness, brisk but not officious, of the staff, and on the other the spontaneous geniality of the battered occupants of the beds. The orderlies can spare little time for talk, but the few chats which they are able to have with patients whom they are helping to change their clothes, or to whom they are proffering the inevitable cocoa (which is a cocktail, as it were, prior to the meal which will be served in the men's own ward), are punctuated by jokes and laughter rather than the