The cannon ball that I told you about that I picked up was used 100 years ago against the Turks; there are no end lying about the fields.
Dr. May returned to England this evening; she will be away about six weeks. She will bring out more stores and will collect fresh funds for the upkeep of our Hospital and Dispensary.
Transport wagons are passing along the road near our camp all night, so perhaps we shall move on shortly. Oxen are used and they only travel about twenty English miles a day.
We have no fresh cases in hospital because there is no fighting at present. There are over one hundred patients at the road-side dispensary; each day some of the cases are terrible—typhus, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and a very bad case of small-pox, but there are no hospitals to send these sort of cases to. To-day a poor girl arrived with one foot black, all the flesh eaten off her leg with gangrene; she had a tubercular foot which she had had a year and it had never been attended to. Women arrive with dreadful diseases, some with cancer.
People in dear old England cannot imagine the state of this part of the world; thousands and thousands are suffering and cannot get attention.
We are now trying to stop some of the dreadful diseases spreading, and are starting another Hospital called the Civil, and this Hospital will take in some of these bad cases. We are also hoping to have the six dispensaries along the line. Our Field Hospital is only for surgical cases.
Another wet day; we had a terrible thunderstorm which returned two nights running; the lightning is much more vivid than in England; in fact it lights up the hills all round and the sky seems to almost open.
To-day is only May 9 with the Serbians; thirteen days difference; it seems so strange.
To-day a man was seen buying Serbian whisky; he gave it to two of the patients and made them drunk. One of my orderlies did the same and was sent away last week. Owing to this one man the whole lot of Austrian orderlies were called into line, twenty-seven in all, and they were marched to the office tent, where Major Partridge talked to them all, boxed the man's ears who bought the whisky and sent him to prison for ten days.