"The one thing dreaded above all others on a warship is cerebro-spinal meningitis, both on account of its unavoidably high rate of mortality and the difficulty of preventing its spread under the limiting conditions. Luckily, we have had practically none of it up here. In the event of the appearance of a case of any infectious disease, the man is isolated, the men of his mess are put under observation, and all of their clothes are disinfected. As soon as possible the case is removed to one of the hospital ships which are always here. The restricted sleeping quarters occasionally are responsible for the quick spread of a bad cold, but the fresh air, free from germs, makes anything like an epidemic of influenza almost out of the question in the Grand Fleet. German measles has been rather a nuisance once or twice; in fact, we have seen rather more of it than we have of the German Fleet. If the latter is as easily disposed of as the former, however, we shall have little to complain of." Of the progressiveness and general up-to-dateness of the Royal Navy Medical Service, I had already heard from a number of sources (I remember in particular how Madame Carrel had told me that the British Admiralty had adopted the remarkable "irrigation" treatment, discovered and perfected by her distinguished husband, long before any French military hospital would even consider it), so I was quite prepared to find every ship in the Grand Fleet amply provided to handle "action eventualities." The problems of a hospital on a warship are quite different from those of even an advanced hospital at the Front. The latter has a fluctuating but more or less unbroken stream of casualties to handle, with sometimes weeks of warning when defensive or offensive action will make unusual demands. A battleship may easily be lying quietly at anchor in the morning and be joined in a death-grapple in the evening. Her surgeons may have spent a year with nothing more to keep their hands in than reducing sprains and stitching up cuts, and then a hundred casualties may drop out of the sky in the wake of a single enemy salvo. For them, it rarely rains but it pours, though it may be a long time between the storms. The usual practice is for a warship to have a small permanent sick bay and hospital capable of coping with routine exigencies, and to supplement these during and after action by converting certain favourably located parts of the ship--always below the water-line if possible--into action dressing-stations. The equipment of these latter--operating tables, beds, lights, etc.--is all made on collapsible lines and kept stored close at hand. The battleship whose remarkable health record I am writing about, takes especial pride in the fact that it has two action dressing-stations, permanently equipped and ready for use at a moment's notice.