2i8 sportsmen Parsons in Peace and War 



" The Germans, though they are committing awful atrocities, 

 are fighting very fairly in the main, and will take a lot of beating. 

 , . . My French efforts at times would make a cat laugh." 



No. 7 Clearing Hospital. 



November 18. — " Since coming here we have been working 

 night and day. We were only one section of a clearing hospital 

 with three surgeons and twenty-one men all told. We had no 

 proper cook. Two of the orderlies volunteered to try and do it, 

 but they could not make much of a hand at it, so I got in and 

 tried to help. I made a stew of meat and vegetables, and gave 

 them tea. They were very thankful. I lived for the first 

 forty-eight hours here on the run between the cook-house (which 

 was in the open, the sleet and rain coming down hard) and the 

 operating-theatre. I have seen such sights in the latter as will 

 last me for all eternity. The surgeons were magnificent. Two 

 of them worked on without a break for thirty-six hours, operat- 

 ing and dressing ghastly wounds. I led them away afterwards, 

 for they could hardly walk. Then we packed some of the cases 

 into the ambulance train, but as fast as we emptied out ambu- 

 lance wagons fresh ones drove up packed with men, and so the 

 round has gone on till last night, when orders came that we were 

 to take no more cases but were to evacuate what we had and 

 stand by for fresh orders. 



" We managed to get in a Celebration this morning, and 

 twenty-eight orderlies, officers, and patients joined us. It was 

 very beautiful and yet very weird, for in the middle of it a 

 Taube dropped a bomb in the Square about two hundred yards 

 away, and the remainder of the service was carried out to an 

 accompaniment of shots by an anti-aircraft gun at the Taube. 



" To-day another Padre, one of our surgeons named Bates 

 (a real hero), and myself went out to see the town that has been 

 the centre of the fighting lately, to get some snapshots. We 

 understood they had left off shelling it, and we got into the 

 middle of the town when suddenly they began to shell it again. 

 For about twenty minutes we were in a centre of flying bricks, 

 stones, broken glass, etc., not to mention shells. 



" Providentially we got away all right, but we had quite 

 eight Jack Johnsons burst within three hundred yards of us, 

 and two of them within one hundred and fifty. It was quite 



