to the Queen's Hospital, Birmingham--"in Skoplje a British
unit was installed in a large factory accommodating over 1000 medical
and surgical patients. Besides their inherent unsuitability the
premises were detestably insanitary and the floor space overcrowded to
its utmost capacity. On the ground floor I saw 250 men lying on sacks
of straw packed closely together, covered only by their ragged uniform
under a blanket. Gangrenous limbs and septic compound fractures were
common, the stench being overpowering; yet every window was closely
shut." He tells how seven out of the members of the British staff went
down with typhus. At U[vz]ice he found over 700 patients crammed into
rooms containing about 500 beds; many were lying on the bare floor;
others were on sacks of straw; others on raised wooden platforms in
series of six men side by side. Often one would see an elderly
warrior, who had been wounded a week or two previously, being jolted
along in an ox-cart with several civilians who were suffering from
typhus--all trying to find a hospital that could take them in. And
meanwhile it was necessary to reorganize the army: all the men between
the ages of seventeen and fifty-five were called to the colours,
including those whom the doctors had declared to be totally unfit for
military service.

THE TREATY OF LONDON, APRIL 1915

On April 26, 1915, the negotiations were concluded between France,
Great Britain, Russia and Italy; the Treaty of London was signed and
the Italians had become our Allies. By this Treaty we and France and
Russia undertook to give them, if we were victorious, a very large
increase of territory--over which, by the way, we none of us had any
right of disposal.

["For Serbia and for Montenegro this is a war of defence and of
liberation and not of conquest," said the Yugoslav Committee in London
(May 1915)--which Committee, by the way, made its first headquarters
in Rome, and only transferred itself to London and Paris in view of
the frankly hostile attitude of Sonnino and his colleagues. It
consisted of the prominent Croats and Slovenes who had managed to
escape across the Austrian frontier. "Serbia and Montenegro," said the
Committee, "fight to liberate our people from a foreign yoke and to
unite them in one sole, free nation.... To perpetuate the separation
of these territories in leaving them under the Austro-Hungarian
domination or another foreign domination, would be in flagrant
violation of our