t to furnish the staff themselves.
There were two French-trained Greek surgeons, a Greek matron, Greek
orderlies, and two Greek nurses. Since the attack began there had been
work for a dozen of the latter, but--as it had been impossible for the
women of most of the Venizelist families to get away from Old Greece--no
others were available. An English nurse, who had marched in the retreat
of the Serbians, and a French nurse from a Saloniki hospital had
volunteered to step into the breach, and these five women were
courageously trying to make up in zeal what they lacked in numbers.

[Sidenote: Working double hours.]

"We are not enough for a double shift since the fighting began," Madame
A----, the matron, had said to me the night of my arrival; "so we are
accomplishing the same end by working double hours. We are working to
atone for the dishonor our King has brought upon our country, just as
our men are fighting to atone for it; and the harder we all work and
fight the sooner it will come about."

The last thing to catch my eye as I looked back from the rim of the
valley when I rode away at midnight had been the flash of a bar of light
on a white uniform, as a tired figure had drooped against the flap of a
hospital tent for a breath of air.

[Sidenote: Women nurses go without sleep.]

"If any one of those women has had a wink of sleep in the last three
days," Captain X---- had said as we reined in to let a string of
ambulances go by, "it must have been taken standing. I have been up most
of the time myself, and never once have I looked across to the clearing
station but I saw some sign of a nurse on the move."

[Sidenote: Venizelos at the nurses' mess.]

Madame A---- had asked me to drop in at the nurses' mess for luncheon in
case I got back from the trenches in time, and this, by dint of hard
riding, I was just able to do. Three or four powerful military cars
drawn up at the hospital gate indicated new arrivals, but as to who they
were I had no hint until I had pushed in through the flap of the mess
tent and found M. Venizelos seated on a soap-box, _vis-a-vis_ Madame
A---- at a table improvised from a couple of condensed milk cases. At
the regular mess table, sitting on reversed water-buckets, were three
French flying officers and a civilian whom I recognized as the private
secretary of M. Venizelos. Two nurses were just rising from unfinished
plates of soup in response to word that a crucial abdominal operation