The men then pass on into the bathroom where they are given about ten minutes to luxuriate with plenty of soap and hot water. As they pass out of the bath through another room they are given clean socks, underclothes and shirts, and by the time they are dressed their own uniforms, disinfected, are handed back to them. The whole operation takes from twenty-five to thirty minutes, and from a thousand to fifteen hundred men can be put through each bath house in a day. The discarded clothes are washed by local peasant women paid by the army; in one of these establishments in our area there were 160 Belgian peasant women engaged in this work. Mending is also done by them, while socks and clothes too far gone to be mended are packed in bundles and sent away to be sold. The waste wash water from the baths and laundries entering the creeks naturally causes trouble from troops down stream who may have to use it. Horses will not touch soapy water, and the brewers object to making beer with it; they say it spoils the beer. Consequently the sanitary officers have in many cases been compelled to put in tanks to treat this dirty water and purify it. This is usually done by adding an excess of chloride of lime, which precipitates the soap as a curd and carries the dirt down with it. By sedimentation, and filtration through canvas, cinders and sand, the water is clarified and turned into the creeks again clean. So completely can this be accomplished that the experience at one bath house is worth narrating. This bath house was built on a little pond which accumulated in winter and was not fed by springs or any other auxiliary source of supply; consequently with the advent of warm weather it would have dried up unless the water had been conserved in some way. The sanitary officer in charge was equal to the task. With the advice of engineers and the laboratory he built a plant which subsequently worked to perfection. The water used to bath at least a thousand men a day, as well as the wash water from the laundry attached to the bath house, was collected and treated with acid to remove the soap; the scum formed carried to the top all of the dirt, which was then filtered off by means of sacking, cinders, and sand. The excess of acid was treated with lime which neutralized it, and the excess of lime was removed by soda. The water was all filtered before it was returned to the pond into which it flowed just as clear as it had been before, and with enough hardness present to give it a lather with soap. The system was operated during the whole summer and gave complete satisfaction. It really did what nature would have done in a much longer time and with a much bigger plant. Had the pond been used to bathe in direct it would have been unfit for use in the course of a few days, whereas by the method employed it was always perfectly sweet and clean.