d to the bidding of the Medical
Transport Officer of the Admiralty and have attached some of the best
locomotives to these trains, usually of twelve coaches. Even when there
has not been an action, and the trains are bearing mostly medical cases,
all passenger and freight traffic gives way to the ambulance trains. If
the surgeon in charge of the train decides that he has a case which
should be hastened to a hospital he wires ahead, so that when he reaches
that point the surgeon or the agent there is on hand with an ambulance
to rush the patient to a local hospital.

Where it is possible, red tape has been eliminated. The cots in which
the patients are carried are sent with the patient from a hospital or
ship, and the patient is only taken out when he arrives at the hospital
of his destination. For the cot bearing the patient, the train surgeon
receives in exchange a clean cot. This cot has been laundered and
fumigated, and is kept on the train so that when only patients are
entrained the surgeon gives a cot for each case taken aboard. Hence the
surgeon always has the same number of cots on his train, and through
this means paper and pencil work is avoided. The patient's clothes are
packed in a bag, and all the valuables of one batch of patients are
sealed up in one envelope, which is receipted for by the surgeon of the
hospital to which the patients are sent.

No patient is transferred from a hospital in a critical condition if it
can be avoided. But sometimes this is necessary, as it was following the
Jutland Battle. Then the most serious cases were held in the hospitals;
while, where it was possible, hundreds of cases were despatched to
institutions at other ports.

The route of these ambulance trains may differ every round trip. One
ambulance train may go to the North of Scotland, while the next one will
only go to Glasgow or Edinburgh if there is no call further north. The
wonderful organisation not only undertakes to relieve hospitals, but
also to ship the patients to institutions unlikely to be suddenly
burdened with many cases; and consideration is also given as to where
the patient can receive the best attention, such as in southern
hospitals.

Fleet-Surgeon A. Stanley Nance is the Medical Transport Officer for
Scotland. He is ever on the alert for what is going on in the hospitals
in his territory. In the event of a great sea conflict, he receives
orders from Sir James Porter and information concerning all