"We are not enough for a double shift since the fighting began," Madame A----, the matron, had said to me the night of my arrival; "so we are accomplishing the same end by working double hours. We are working to atone for the dishonor our King has brought upon our country, just as our men are fighting to atone for it; and the harder we all work and fight the sooner it will come about." The last thing to catch my eye as I looked back from the rim of the valley when I rode away at midnight had been the flash of a bar of light on a white uniform, as a tired figure had drooped against the flap of a hospital tent for a breath of air. [Sidenote: Women nurses go without sleep.] "If any one of those women has had a wink of sleep in the last three days," Captain X---- had said as we reined in to let a string of ambulances go by, "it must have been taken standing. I have been up most of the time myself, and never once have I looked across to the clearing station but I saw some sign of a nurse on the move." [Sidenote: Venizelos at the nurses' mess.] Madame A---- had asked me to drop in at the nurses' mess for luncheon in case I got back from the trenches in time, and this, by dint of hard riding, I was just able to do. Three or four powerful military cars drawn up at the hospital gate indicated new arrivals, but as to who they were I had no hint until I had pushed in through the flap of the mess tent and found M. Venizelos seated on a soap-box, _vis-a-vis_ Madame A---- at a table improvised from a couple of condensed milk cases. At the regular mess table, sitting on reversed water-buckets, were three French flying officers and a civilian whom I recognized as the private secretary of M. Venizelos. Two nurses were just rising from unfinished plates of soup in response to word that a crucial abdominal operation awaited their attendance at the theatre. "Most of the Provisional Government has come out to pay us a visit this morning," said Madame A----, showing me to a blanket-roll seat at one end of the mess table, "and we are lunching early so that it can get back to Saloniki to take up the reins of State again. The General has carried off the Admiral and the Foreign Minister, but I have managed to keep the President for _our_ banquet. He has made the round of the hospital and spoken to every man here--that is," she added with a catch in her voice, "to all that could hear him. We've--we've lost three men this morning just because there wasn't staff to operate quickly enough." [Sidenote: A strange banquet at which the guests contribute.]