Luncheon over, we bade the splendid young General and his staff good-bye, and motored quite a distance to visit one of the French field hospitals. The wounded, after having first aid applied in the trenches, were brought here in ambulances, where their wounds were thoroughly dressed or operations performed. When there was a great rush of wounded those capable of standing the journey were shipped on to base hospitals as quickly as possible to make room for the new cases. During the last few months, however, there had been so little hard fighting on the section of the front which this hospital served, that many of the wounded had been kept there for weeks and some for months. The big rooms on the ground floor of the large country house in which the hospital had been located, had been converted into wards for the wounded privates, while the bedrooms on the upper floor were reserved principally for officers. It was curious to hear the deprecatory tone in which the Chief Surgeon regretted that he had no freshly wounded to bandage or operate on for our benefit. In fact from the front hospitals to the great base hospitals of Paris the surgeons are all alike. They cannot keep a professional note of regret out of their voices when explaining that very few wounded have come in of late, nor a professional note of encouragement when they understand an important action is soon to be fought which will again fill their cots with "cases." It would be an outrage to hold this attitude against these splendid men. If they had not become impregnated by their professional point of view toward the horrors of their work, they would all long ago have been in madhouses. Our whole progress through the hospital was a strange conglomeration of pathos and farce. For the Surgeon in Command, on our being introduced to him, stated that he was the proud possessor of an orderly who spoke the English tongue "à merveille." Our staff-officers politely indicated to him that our own French, though not perhaps up to Comédie Française standards, was no mean thing, and would render his explanations entirely comprehensible to us. But these hints were of no avail. The accomplishments of his linguistic prodigy must not be wasted. So the orderly was produced and turned out to be master of the most grotesquely unintelligible English that I have ever listened to.