omething casual, of the camping-out order: a
shed knocked together with tin-tacks, doubtfully weather-proof and
probably scamped by profiteering contractors. Of the huts provided at
certain training centres this may have been true. The finely austere
and efficient ranks of hut-wards which constitute the main part of the
3rd London General Hospital are the very antithesis of that picture.
They may look flimsy. They were certainly put up at a remarkable pace. I
myself witnessed the erection of the final fifty of them. An open field
vanished in less than a month, and "Bungalow Town" (as someone nicknamed
it) appeared. You would have said that such speed meant countless
imperfections of detail. No doubt some tinkerings and modifications were
bound to follow, when the regiment of workmen, carpenters, engineers,
drainage specialists, electricians, had vanished. But, in the long run,
the ideal hospital remained--a hospital with which the So-and-So Club in
Pall Mall, for all its luxuriousness, could never hope to compare.

There are still a dozen wards--used mostly for medical cases--in the
Scottish baronial building. Its rooms, too, provide the Administration
with offices. Its great Dining Hall is a splendid Receiving Ward for the
sorting-out and clearance of newly-arrived convoys of patients. We
should be poorly situated indeed if we had not our Scottish baronial
main building to be the hub of the hospital's activities, or rather the
handle from which springs the fan of the hospital's great extension--the
huts. Approaching the hospital the visitor sees nothing of those huts.
As he walks up the drive he flatters himself that he has reached his
destination. He discovers his mistake when, at the inquiry bureau in the
entrance, he is informed that the patient whom he has come to interview
is (say) in "C 13." He is advised to go down the passage on his left,
turn to his right, turn to the left again and then again to the
right--after which he had better seek a further re-direction. Launching
himself optimistically on this voyage he learns, long ere he has
attained his goal, that a modern war-hospital can hide a considerable
extent of pedestrianism behind a comparatively short Scottish baronial
frontage. He will be fortunate if five minutes' steady tramping brings
him to the bedside of his friend in C 13.

Perhaps he will content himself in his footsoreness by noting that, to
reach C 13, he has not had to go up or down any stairs.