Scarcely had we made this terrible discovery, when an ambulance arrived with two wounded officers, and asked if we were ready to admit patients.  We said, “No,” and I almost think that we were justified.  The men in charge of the ambulance seemed very disappointed, and said that in that case there was nothing for it but to leave the wounded men on their stretchers till an ambulance train should come to take them to Calais, which they might ultimately reach in two or three days’ time.  They were badly wounded, and we thought that at least we could do better than that; so we made up a couple of beds in one of the empty rooms, and took them in.  Little did we dream of what we were in for.  An hour later another ambulance arrived, and as we had started, we thought that we might as well fill up the ward we had begun.  That did it.  The sluice-gates were opened, and the wounded poured in.  In four days we admitted three hundred and fifty patients, all of them with injuries of the most terrible nature.  The cases we had seen at Antwerp were nothing to these.  Arms and legs were torn right off or hanging by the merest shreds, ghastly wounds of the head left the brain exposed.  Many of the poor fellows were taken from the ambulances dead, and of the others at least half must have died.

For four days and four nights the operating theatre was at work continuously, till one sickened at the sight of blood and at the thought of an operation.  Three operating tables were in almost continuous use, and often three major operations were going on at the same time; and all the instruments we had were two scalpels, six artery forceps, two dissecting forceps, and a finger-saw.  Think of doing amputations through the thigh with that equipment!  There was nothing else for it.  Either the work had to be done or the patients had to die.  And there was certainly no one else to do it.  The rapid advance of the Germans had swept away all the admirable arrangements which the Belgian Army had made for dealing with its wounded.  The splendid hospitals of Ghent and Ostend were now in German hands, and there had not yet been time to get new ones established.  The cases could be sent to Calais, it was true, but there the accommodation was so far totally inadequate, and skilled surgical assistance was not to be obtained.  For the moment our hospital, with its ludicrous equipment, was the only hope of the badly wounded.  By the mercy of Heaven, we had plenty of chloroform and morphia, and a fair supply of dressings, and we knew by experience that at this stage it is safer to be content with the minimum of actual operative work, so that I think it was we, rather than our patients, who suffered from the want of the ordinary aids of surgery.  In the wards there was a shortage, almost as serious, of all the ordinary equipment of nursing, for much of this had been too cumbrous to bring from Antwerp; and though we had brought out a fair supply of ordinary requirements, we had never dreamt of having to deal