CHAPTER XI
HOSPITALS AND HEADQUARTERS
FIRST of all we drove to a temporary hospital on the close the adjective had prepared us for a comfortless and hastily thrown together affair. Instead we found another monument to that admirable efficiency which the English, since the commencement of the war, have developed at the cost of a multitude of traditional fetiches.
Grass plots and lower beds flourished. There was a net work of macadam roads put in by the Royal Engineers. Only one or two of the revered marquee tents survived; for, no matter how the satirist of British tradition may sneer, experience dictates everything in Kitchener's army, and long, narrow wooden buildings of one story have proved themselves more serviceable, more adaptable to cleanliness, and, curiously, less expensive, than the tents which served for field hospitals during so many wars.
A colonel of the medical corps greeted us, offering to direct our exploration.
“Each one of these huts," he said, " is a ward."
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