We were now the official advanced base hospital of the Belgian Army, and not merely, as in Antwerp, a free organization working by itself.  The advantage of this arrangement was that we had a constant supply of wounded sent to us whenever there was any fighting going on, and that the evacuation of our patients was greatly facilitated.  Every morning at ten o’clock Colonel Maestrio made the tour of our wards, and arranged for the removal to the base hospital at Dunkirk of all whom we wished to send away.  It gave us the further advantage of special privileges for our cars and ambulances, which were allowed to go practically anywhere in search of the wounded with absolute freedom.  Formerly we had owed a great deal to the assistance of the Belgian Croix Rouge, who had been very good in supplementing our supply of dressings, as well as in getting us army rations for the patients.  This, of course, had all come to an end, and we now had to rely on our own resources.

Our personnel had undergone considerable alteration, for while several of our original members had dropped out, we had joined forces with Dr. Hector Munro’s Ambulance Corps, and four of their doctors had joined our medical staff.  Dr. Munro and his party had worked in connection with the hospitals of Ghent till the German advance forced both them and ourselves to retreat to Ostend.  There we met and arranged to carry on our work together at Furnes.  The arrangement was of the greatest possible advantage to both of us, for it gave us the service of their splendid fleet of ambulances, and it gave them a base to which to bring their wounded.  We were thus able to get the wounded into hospital in an unusually short space of time, and to deal effectively with many cases which would otherwise have been hopeless.  Smooth coordination with an ambulance party is, in fact, the first essential for the satisfactory working of an advanced hospital.  If full use is to be made of its advantages, the wounded must be collected and brought in with the minimum of delay, whilst it must be possible to evacuate at once all who are fit to be moved back to the base.  In both respects we were at Furnes exceptionally well placed.

We were established in a large straggling building of no attraction whatever except its cubic capacity.  It was fairly new, and devoid of any of the interest of antiquity, but it presented none of the advantages of modern architecture.  In fact, it was extremely ugly and extremely inconvenient, but it was large.  Two of the largest classrooms and the refectory were converted into wards.  At first the question of beds was a serious difficulty, but by the kind intervention of the Queen we were able to collect a number from houses in the town, whilst Her Majesty herself gave us twenty first-class beds with box-spring mattresses.  Later on we got our supplies from England, and we could then find beds for a hundred patients.  Even then we were not at the end of our capacity, for we