Until early in August the hospital was without its own nursing Sisters—these services being performed by members of the Q.A.I.M.N.S., the Canadian Military Nursing Service, and English V.A.D.’s, who did all that hard work and devotion to duty could do to make up for the shortage in number. On 5th August, however, Matron Creagh and twenty-one members of the S.A.M.N.S. arrived from England, and the greatest difficulties in this respect were over. The nurses’ camp had to be pitched in the wooded ground of a château some little distance off; but when the storm clouds rolled up the valley, and the winter rains set in, they had perforce to be billeted in the town until the huts which were contemplated for them were completed. Situated as it was at the advanced base in a convenient position for their reception, the hospital, during the autumn of 1916, received a large number of wounded direct from the Somme battlefield. Amongst the earliest admissions in July 1916 were South Africans wounded at Delville Wood, and towards the end of July General Lukin was one of the first officer patients. The most severely wounded journeyed by specially-fitted hospital barges, which, from the casualty clearing stations around Corbie, floated down the Somme to Abbeville, where the patients were disembarked and taken by motor ambulances to the hospital. The use of barges was restricted to those cases who were unable to stand the strain of a journey by train. Usually they travelled in pairs, but on more than one occasion during the autumn of 1916 patients from six barges were admitted during the twenty-four hours. Towards the end of 1916 the barges ceased running, as the winter rains had rendered the passage down the Somme too dangerous, and they were not again employed, as the advance in the spring of 1917 carried the fighting away from the river. Fortunately, during the first few weeks after the arrival of the unit in France, the weather was fine, but even then difficulties were experienced in regard to the main road leading to the hospital. For part of the way this was formed by “sleepers,” but as the supply of them gave out beech planking had to be substituted. This quickly “warped,” and becoming displaced with the constant traffic, was always a source of trouble, as the underlying chalk during the dry weather quickly powdered to a fine dust, and later, when the rains set in, turned into a particularly greasy form of mud. As soon as materials and labour became available, the “sleeper track” was continued, and a large “triage” constructed on which the ambulance wagons could turn; but it was not until many months later that it became possible to build a macadamized road connecting the hospital with the Route d’Amiens. The old entrance was then utilized as an exit for empty wagons, and the original signboard of the hospital, on which Major Merritt had painted the Springbok badge, was removed to the new entrance.