horizontal form reaches them can an operation in the full sense of
the word be performed upon it. The Clearing Station that I saw could
accommodate seven hundred cases, and had held nearer eight
hundred. It was housed in an extensive public building. It employed
seven surgeons, and I forget how many dressers. It had an
abdominal ward, where cases were kept until they could take solid
food; and a head ward; and an officers' ward; immense stores; a
Church of England chapel; and a shoot down which mattresses with
patients thereon could be slid in case of fire.

Nearly seven hundred operations had been performed in it during
the war. Nevertheless, as the young Colonel in charge said to me:
"The function of a Clearing Station is to clear. We keep the majority
of the cases only a few hours." Thence the horizontal forms pass
into (5) Ambulance Trains. But besides Ambulance trains there are
Ambulance barges, grand vessels flying the Union Jack and the
Red Cross, with lifts, electric light, and an operating-table. They are
towed by a tug to the coast through convenient canals.

You may catch the stream once more, and at its fullest, in (6) the
splendid hospitals at Boulogne. At Boulogne the hospital laundry
work is such that it has overpowered the town and has to be sent to
England. But even at Boulogne, where the most solid architecture,
expensively transformed, gives an air of utter permanency to the
hospitals, the watchword is still to clear, to pass the cases on. The
next stage (7) is the Hospital Ship, specially fitted out, waiting in the
harbour for its complement. When the horizontal forms leave the
ship they are in England; they are among us, and the great stream
divides into many streams, just as at the rail-head at the other end
the great stream of supply divides into many streams, and is lost.