Farther along, attached to the Casino, whose spacious gaming rooms make wonderfully cheerful wards, is a smaller hotel, where the men suffering from skin diseases are treated. One's heart goes out to these men, especially the wounded ones, who through no fault of their own are afflicted with the foul diseases that follow in the train of war.
The main road is lined with hospitals—the "British," the "Anglo-American," the "Rawal Pindi" (so called because the unit was mobilised in that far-away Indian station), and others.
The great objection to the converted hotels is the smallness of the well-appointed rooms, which gives one the desire to knock down intervening walls and form them into one spacious room to save the sisters' feet and the patients' voices!
One is lost in admiration now at the organisation of things, just as two months ago one was appalled by the state of unreadiness. Nothing that can be done for our men is omitted.
February 3rd. For the last time I watch the moon wane, the sun rise over the mist-bathed harbour. Will the picture I have learned to love so well ever fade? The countless masts rising to the sky, the water dashing over the distant breakwater, the clock at the Gare Maritime, now visible, now obscured by smoke from the packet-boat's funnel.
The incoming destroyers, the sister hospital ships lying abreast, the distant windmill on the hill, round which many corrugated iron buildings are springing up (bakeries, they say), the weather-beaten tars, the women, their backs bent with the weight of their sacks of mussels and cockles, tramping along barefooted or in sabots, the ceaseless stream of ambulances.
February 8th. Laden with parting gifts and consoled by parting regrets (strangest among them those of our padre, who will miss having someone to darn his socks!), we found ourselves at our new domain—the American girl and I.
Certainly the circumstances of our arrival were far from favourable, for my colleague fell very ill the day we arrived, and after a night spent on the floor of her ten-by-eight-feet-long room (oh, those boards!—my bones still ache, my head swims in memory of them), we installed her in a military hospital, and set to work to "carry on."
Two other workers have arrived from England; neither of them having done hard manual labour before, they are apt to find this somewhat strenuous, though to our more veteran hands it is child's play. Footsoreness, too, that bane of all amateur workers, is their portion.
There are times when one wonders if all new things are horrid!