Naturally, the Bulgarian peasant is wonderfully healthy. His food is rough whole-meal bread and cheese; his occasional luxuries, a dish of the sour milk which is so well known in London, a little alcohol on Sunday, some sweet stuff, and, rarely, grilled meat or meat soup with vegetables. It is possible to judge that his alimentary tract differs widely from that of the Western European. I should say he was almost immune from enteric, unless attacked by a very virulent infection. He can live on bread and water alone without serious inconvenience for lengthy periods. His blood is very pure, and ordinarily heals in a way that astonished the British surgeons. Here, then, was the best of material from an army medical point of view. Given the roughest food, the simplest sanitary precautions, and ordinarily good field dressing, and the army would have marched without disease and the wounded would have dropped out of the firing line for a few days only. But there were no sanitary precautions; hence disease. The hospital service as regards the first aid in the field was pitiably deficient; hence serious and unnecessary losses of wounded. Without seeking to pile up a record of horrors, I cite a few individual instances to illustrate bad methods. At the front, punctured bayonet wounds were closely bandaged--in some cases stitched up--without provision for irrigation, without even proper cleansing. This led to gangrene and often caused the sacrifice of a life or of a limb (which, to these peasants, was almost as great a loss as that of life: their feeling against amputations was very strong, and if they understood that amputation was intended, they sometimes begged to be "killed instead"). Bullet wounds also were often plugged up on the field. When proper treatment was at last available, it was sometimes too late to avoid death or amputation. No treatment at all on the field would have been preferable to this well-intentioned but shocking ignorance.