empty. (As if any war-hospital, in
these times, could be empty!) But our patients have only a short
acquaintanceship with the receiving-hall beds: these beds are momentary
resting-places on their journey healthwards: they are not meant to lie
in but to lie _on_. The three-score wards for which the receiving hall
is the clearing house are the real destination of the patients; down
long corridors, in wards far cosier because less ornate than this, the
patient will find "his" bed ready for him, the bed which he is not to
lie on but _in_.

We orderlies meet each convoy at the front door of the hospital. The
walking-cases are the first to arrive--men who are either not ill
enough, or not badly enough wounded, to need to be put on stretchers in
ambulances. They come from the station in motor-cars supplied by that
indefatigable body, the London Ambulance Column. The walking-case
alights from his car, is conducted into the receiving hall, and ten
minutes later is in the bathroom. For the ritual of the bath must on no
account be omitted--although now not so obviously imperative as in the
early period of the war. Few patients reach us who have not first
sojourned, either for a day or two or for weeks, in hospitals in France.
They are therefore merely travel-stained, as you or I might be
travel-stained after coming over from Dublin to Euston. The bath is thus
a pleasure more than a necessity. Whereas there _was_ an era, when our
guests came straight from only too populous trenches....

"O.C. Baths," as the bathroom orderly was nicknamed, had to be
circumspect in the performance of his job.

The few minutes which the walking-case spends in the receiving hall are
occupied (1) in drinking a cup of cocoa, and (2) in "having his
particulars taken."

Poor soul!--he is weary of giving his "particulars." He has had to give
them half-a-dozen times at least, perhaps more, since he left the front.
At the field dressing-station they wanted his particulars, at the
clearing-station, on the train, at the base hospital, on another train,
on the steamer, on the next train, and now in this English hospital. As
he sits and comforts himself with cocoa, a "V.A.D." hovers at his
elbow, intent on a printed sheet, the details of which she is rapidly
filling-in with a pencil. For this is a card-index war, a colossal
business of files and classifications and ledgers and statistics and
registrations, an undertaking on a scale beside which Harrod's and