The nurses on the hospital trains have a fine record of service. Though less monotonous than the life in a stationary hospital, it is a curious existence to be living permanently in a train, continually travelling to and fro on one stretch of line, nursing in cramped quarters and under particularly tiring conditions. Three nurses recently received the Military Medal “for conspicuous bravery under fire, on No. 27 Ambulance Train.” The train was carrying a full load of nearly five hundred sick and wounded away by night from a town in the vicinity of the Somme front, when an aeroplane attack began. Five bombs fell in the immediate neighbourhood of the train. The windows were smashed and the lights went out. The train gave a heave which threw some of the patients out of their cots. One of the sisters is reported to have called out to the men in her coach: “Now, be quiet and good, boys, till I light a lamp.” This she managed to do, and the men declared that her hand never trembled. The commanding officer reports that “the sisters went about their work coolly, collectively, and cheerfully, and that by their magnificent conduct they not only allayed alarm among the helpless patients and those suffering from shell shock, but caused both patients and personnel to play up to the standard which they set.” Wonderful work, too, has been done by the nurses in the hospital ships in conditions of ever-increasing danger. “We landed 1300 wounded yesterday morning,” writes a hospital ship sister on the cross-Channel service. “It was a wonderful experience ... nearly nine hundred were on the decks and steerage with broken arms, etc. All the eighty-four in my ward were stretcher cases.... The work was terrific.” There is now an all too long list of nurses who have suffered shipwreck at the hands of the enemy, while some have lost their lives. When a great ship was recently torpedoed in the Mediterranean the nurses had a narrow escape. One of them has described her experience in the open boat as follows: “Our safety lay in keeping as far from the ship as possible, heavy seas making the pull to land out of the question. The huge swell increased the fear for the safety of our boat, as we were sitting waist-deep in water. Baling was of no use; the harder we baled, the quicker we filled. A cry from the back of the boat caused all eyes to turn in time to see the ship first list to port side, then turn and take a long, straight dip beneath the waves. The sea was wilder and rougher than ever, and three gigantic waves in succession completely swamped our small boat, and all that was left to us now was to cling to the ropes in the boat and to each other.” Eventually, however, the nurses were rescued just in time by a destroyer. Such experiences are no longer rare adventures--they are the hourly anticipation of all workers who serve in hospital ships, since the Germans have ceased to regard the badge of the Red Cross as a sacred and inviolable symbol.