National Debt.
----

If the incomes of all the well-known American specialists who have come
to France to look after the health of the A.E.F. troops were lumped
together they would be enough to pay off the national debt of the
country and then leave sufficient to satisfy a camp store-keeper.

This is no pipe dream or a simple newspaper yarn, but the plain truth.
Some of the medicos from the United States have given up earnings of
such big figures they should only be mentioned kneeling. Where they
gathered in half a million at home yearly, they are accepting a major's
three thousand and service allowance, in order to see that Bill Jones
from Kankakee or Sam Smith from Pleasantville has the proper treatment
for warts in his stomach or barnacles on his thinking apparatus.

[Illustration: Ward in an A.E.F. Hospital, Showing Some of the First
to Pay a Visit to "Blighty."]

In addition to separating themselves from large wads of coin and all the
comforts of home, they have brought over the staffs of their various
hospitals, who know all their funny ways of operating, from how best to
cut a man loose from his appendix to painless extraction of the
bankroll. They have also brought along all their collections of patent
knives and scissors, the only thing they left behind being the doctors'
bills that would take a year's service as a doughboy to meet the first
instalment.

A Fear to Forget.

Nearly everyone has an ingrowing objection to going to a hospital, or
acknowledging he must take the count for an illness, because of fear as
to what treatment he may draw.

Forget it!

The Amexforce hospitals are not built along those lines, nor are the
nurses sweet young things of fifty odd summers who hand out tracts with
the morning's milk or make kittenish love to a lad who may be tied down
to a bed or too weak to run away. And the doctors are not owlish-looking
creatures with whiskers that would make a goat die of envy and sick-room
manners that would scare a Mental Scientist into catalepsy. They are
real human beings who understand the troubles of mankind from nostalgia
(professional name for homesickness) down to enlargement of the coco
(unprofessional name for the swelled head) and are doing everything in
their power to make a little easier the big game we are playing to a
showdown with the Kaiser.

It's human nature to hate to go to the doctor.