ing which we were told was the military
hospital. Princess V., Colonel S., and a Russian student were working
hard in the operating-room, and we hastily put on clean overalls and
joined them. They all looked absolutely worn out, and the doctor dropped
asleep between each case; but fresh wounded were being brought in every
minute and there was no one else to help. Lodz was one big hospital. We
heard that there were more than 18,000 wounded there, and I can well
believe it. Every building of any size had been turned into a hospital,
and almost all the supplies of every kind had given out.

The building we were in had been a day-school, and the top floor was
made up of large airy schoolrooms that were quite suitable for wards.
But the shelling recommenced so violently that the wounded all had to be
moved down to the ground floor and into the cellars. The place was an
absolute inferno. I could never have imagined anything worse. It was
fearfully cold, and the hospital was not heated at all, for there was no
wood or coal in Lodz, and for the same reason the gas-jets gave out only
the faintest glimmer of light. There was no clean linen, and the poor
fellows were lying there still in their verminous, blood-soaked shirts,
shivering with cold, as we had only one small blanket each for them.
They were lucky if they had a bed at all, for many were lying with only
a little straw between them and the cold stone floor. There were no
basins or towels or anything to wash up with, and no spittoons, so the
men were spitting all over the already filthy floor. In the largest ward
where there were seventy or eighty men lying, there was a lavatory
adjoining which had got blocked up, and a thin stream of dirty water
trickled under the door and meandered in little rivulets all over the
room. The smell was awful, as some of the men had been there already
several days without having had their dressings done.

This was the state in which the hospital had been handed over to us. It
was a military hospital whose staff had had orders to leave at four
o'clock that morning, and they handed the whole hospital with its 270
patients over to us just as it was; and we could do very little towards
making it more comfortable for them. The stench of the whole place was
horrible, but it was too cold to do more than open the window for a
minute or two every now and then. It was no one's fault that things were
in such a horrible condition--it was just the force