I have been here a week on leave. Tomorrow I start back for Paris once more. Where I am to go after that is uncertain. It seems strange to be in France and not be wading through seas of mud, but to have firm turf and dry roads beneath one’s feet. The hamlets here, while picturesque, are quite spruce and tidy, amazingly different from the quaint but indescribably dirty little mudpie muck-heap villages to which I have been used. This pretty little coast town, once a fishing village, then a summer resort, is now chiefly a hospital. All the large hotels have been taken over for wards and nurses’ quarters, the big casino filled with row on row of iron cots. It is an American hospital with American doctors, nurses and orderlies, but attached to the B. E. F. and filled of course with British patients. As in all the English hospitals, as soon as a patient is able to get out of bed he is dressed in a “suit of blues;” trousers and jumper blouse of bright blue cotton, white shirt, scarlet tie and handkerchief to match, making him look exactly like a grown-up Greenaway boy. The men hate them, they tell me, but I for one am grateful to the designer as the bright blue and scarlet makes wonderful splotches of color in the landscape. There may be a more disgusted set of boys in France than these here in the hospital corps at Base No. 2, but if so I have yet to meet them. One of the first units to come across, landing in May of 1917, every man enlisted, so they tell me, because he thought it was the quickest means of getting to the front in field hospital service and most of them enlisted to do some form of specialized work; but, medical students, college professors, and motor experts, they each and all were given the job of hospital orderly which means scrubbing floors, washing windows, shovelling coal, doing the hard and dirty work of a hospital, and, most galling I fancy of all,—taking orders from girls with whom you are not allowed to associate or even speak except in the line of business. The X-ray expert has been delegated to the job of keeping the hospital pigs. I saw him in a pair of grimy overalls trundling a well-worn wheelbarrow down the street. The man who speaks eight languages, and enlisted as interpreter, spends his days checking up clothes in the laundry. And here as hospital orderlies in spite of their frantic efforts to get transferred, it seems likely that they will stay. But these are dark days for us all just now, with the news that comes in every day of the German drive. “What do the officers in the hospital think? What do they say about it?” I tease the nurses. “They think that we will hold them,” they reply, but none too hopefully.