oked tremendous applause
from a packed congregation of boys in blue.

The old recreation room is fitted with a permanent stage for theatricals
and concerts. It is also our "Movie Palace." (I think our hospital was
the first to instal a cinematograph as a fixture.) During the morning
the floor area is dotted with miniature billiard tables--which are never
for a moment out of use. In the afternoon these are removed; some
hundreds of chairs replace them; and at 4.30 we begin an
entertainment--music, a play (we have had Shakespeare here), lantern
slides, films, or what not. Those entertainments, which have continued
unbrokenly since the hospital began to function in 1914, constitute the
outstanding feature of the "good time" enjoyed by 3rd Londoners. The
"Old Rec." and its crowded concerts will be a memory cherished by hosts
of fighting men from the homeland and from overseas.

In the original hospital plan--drawn up before the war--the Old Rec.
(which is a part of the main school building) was marked down to be a
ward of forty beds. Its structure, its internal geography, and the sheer
impossibility of providing it with the essential sanitary conveniences,
would make it unsuitable to be a ward of four beds, let alone of forty.
On this account its allotment for recreation purposes would be
excusable. But the Old Rec. and the New Rec. too, for that matter,
justify their superficial waste of bed-space on other--and
unanswerable--grounds. It is a mere matter of common sense to arrange
some centre to which the patient can repair and employ his leisure when
he is sufficiently well to potter about though not well enough to be
discharged from hospital. Instead of idling in his ward and disturbing
the patients who are still confined to bed--and who, often, are urgently
in need of quietness--the convalescent departs to one or other of the
recreation rooms, morning and afternoon, where he can make as much
noise as he likes and where he can meet and fraternise with his comrades
from every front. (What exchanging of stories those recreation rooms
have witnessed!) On the one hand, then, the seriously ill patient is not
annoyed by the rovings in the ward of the walking patients; and on the
other the walking patients are not irked by the necessity for keeping
quiet at a period when returning health stimulates them to a wholesome
desire for fun. Both kinds of patients, thus, may legitimately be said
to get better more quickly than they wou