operating theatre, and after any exceptional operation they would follow the progress of the patient with the keenest interest.  Many of the cases with which we had to deal required a certain amount of ingenuity in the reconstruction of what had been destroyed, so that surgery had often to be on rather original lines.  What interested them most was the fixation of fractures by means of steel plates, which we adopted in all our serious cases.  Apparently the method is very little used abroad, and as an operation it is distinctly spectacular, for in a few minutes a shapeless mass which the patient cannot bear to be touched is transformed into a limb almost as strong as the other, which can be moved about in any direction without fear of breaking, and, when the patient recovers consciousness, almost without discomfort.  We almost always had an interested audience, professional, clerical, or lay, for the chauffeurs found much amusement in these feats of engineering.

In the afternoon we almost always had some distinguished visitor to entertain, and it is one of my chief regrets that we never kept a visitors’ book.  Its pages would one day have been of the greatest interest.  Twice every week the Queen of the Belgians came round our wards.  She came quite simply, with one of her ladies and one of the Belgian medical officers, and no one could possibly have taken a deeper interest in the patients.  Her father studied medicine as a hobby, and had, indeed, become a very distinguished physician, and she herself has had considerable training in medicine, so that her interest was a great deal more than that of an ordinary lay visitor.  She was quite able to criticize and to appreciate details of nursing and of treatment.  She always spoke to every patient, and she had a kind word for every one of them, Belgian, French, or even German, for we had a few Germans.  There was something deeply touching in the scene.  The dimly lit ward, with its crude furniture, the slim figure in black, bending in compassion over the rough fellows who would gladly have given their lives for her, and who now lay wounded in the cause in which she herself had suffered.  The Germans may destroy Belgium, but they will never destroy the kingdom of its Queen.  Sometimes the King came to see his soldiers—­a tall, silent man, with the face of one who has suffered much, and as simple, as gentle, and as kindly as his Queen.  It was good to see the faces light up as he entered a ward, to see heads painfully raised to gaze after no splendid uniform, but a man.

One of our most distinguished and most welcome visitors was Madame Curie, the discoverer of radium.  She brought her large X-ray equipment to Furnes for work amongst the wounded, and we persuaded her to stay with us for a week.  One of our storerooms was rapidly fitted up as an impromptu radiographic department, the windows painted over and covered with thick paper, a stove introduced, and a dark-room contrived with