keep our patients
till such time as they are to all intents and purposes cured. A
very few convalescent homes will admit cases which still require
treatment, but only a very few. The bulk of them expect their
inmates to do the work of the establishment. Now, this is most
unreasonable, for a country hospital is cheaper to build and
should cost less to run than one in town, and in many cases the
patients will recover in half the time. Our hospitals in London are
always crowded, the waiting-lists mount up till it seems
hopeless to attack them, and all the time it is because we have
no base hospital down in the country to which our patients
might be sent to recover. I wonder how long it will be before
each of the great London hospitals has its own base down in
the country, with its own motor ambulances and its own ambulance
coaches to carry its patients in comfort by rail to surroundings
where they could recover as can never be possible in the
middle of the London slums? And as to getting the staff to
look after it, there would probably be a waiting-list for week-ends.

But there are more important considerations in this war than
surgery, and one would have to be very blind not to perceive
that this is a life-and-death struggle between Britain and
Germany. The involvement of other nations is merely accidental.
It is ourselves whom Germany is making this huge effort to crush,
and but for one small circumstance she would have come within
a measurable prospect of success. To swoop down on France
through Belgium, to crush her in three weeks, to seize her fleet,
and with the combined fleets of France and Germany to attack
ours--that was the proposition, and who can say that it might not
have succeeded? The small circumstance which Germany overlooked
was Belgium, and it is to the heroic resistance of Belgium that we owe
the fact that the German advance has been stopped.

At the cost of the desolation of their own country, Belgium has
perhaps saved the flag of Britain, for where would it have flown
on the seas if Germany had won? And at the very least she has
saved us from a war beside which this is nothing--a war not
now, but a few years hence, when she might have controlled
half the Continent, and we should have stood alone. We owe
an incalculable debt to Belgium, and we can only repay it by
throwing into this war every resource that our country has to
offer. For the only end which can bring peace to Europe is the
total an