In addition to their great hospital work, the Joint Societies of the British Red Cross and the Order of St. John have established many of what may be called the additional links in the long hospital chain which stretches with such perfect organisation from the spot where the soldier is wounded on the battlefield to the point where he is able to return with renewed strength to duty. The accounts which follow of the experiences of two workers illustrate the similar lives of many other “V.A.Ds.” [Illustration: MISS EVELYN LYNE MISS MADGE GREG _To face page 119_ ] Miss Evelyn Lyne went to France in October, 1914, as cook in the first Voluntary Aid Detachment to be sent abroad. The detachment was to start a rest station at one of the base railway stations for feeding and re-dressing the wounded as they came through in the hospital trains from the front. A series of railway luggage-vans drawn up on a siding had to serve as the headquarters of the detachment, which Miss Lyne described as follows: “We had very hard work and great fun scrubbing and disinfecting the vans; they looked beautiful when finished, and were equipped as a kitchen, dispensary, dressing station, store-room and common room respectively. No one would believe what a charming kitchen a railway truck made. Besides the kitchen we had a very long fire burning between old railway lines arranged at the right distance to support the huge pots for making cocoa, six pots at a time, so that we could have enough for 300 boiling at once. We worked day and night at the rest station in twelve-hour shifts, and, being a humble cook, it was my lot to stand for hours over the fire stirring cocoa, sometimes in the pouring rain, and with smoke belching into my eyes.” As a rule the rest-station workers were given only an hour’s warning of the arrival of a hospital train, and then had to prepare food for from 300 to 800 wounded men. When the trains came in, the workers would take their cauldrons of cocoa or soup and baskets of food on handcarts to the carriages. “No words can ever express how splendid the wounded men were,” wrote Miss Lyne: “one never heard a complaint, and we were so thankful to be able to do just that little for them.” Later Miss Lyne was sent to cook for between eighty and ninety nurses at their billet in an old château at one of the hospital bases. This was hard work indeed, for she was the only cook, and had eight meals a day to serve. The nurses were on Army rations, so a whole sheep or the quarter of a bullock would be left at the door daily, and Miss Lyne soon became an expert butcher! When later she had to return to England she wrote: “I shall always look back on those days in France as the happiest time of my life.” She is now working as an inspector of hostels under the Ministry of Munitions.