On the Fringe of the Great Fight

CANADIAN

British War Office to purchase a huge motor caravan to be equipped as a mobile laboratory. The caravan had been built originally by a wealthy automobile manufacturer at a cost of 5,000 pounds, and had been completely e

rior was torn out and replaced with work benches and sinks, while shelves and racks were provided for

ive miles an hour he had an absolutely unimpeded road. After one look at this huge affair, which was about the size of one of our large moving vans, bearing down on t

rmission was obtained from the Director of the Canadian Medical Service, to send out a Canadian laboratory. For some unexplained reason the Canadian Government refused the necessary funds for the chassis so that we were compelled to pack our equipment in twenty-four numbered cases, all of which could be carried on a three-ton motor lorry. I had discovered that the officers in

he staff of that hospital. The Lozier car which had been given me by the Canadian Government was also to go as part of the equipment. After working in the office of the Director of Medical Services for a couple of weeks straightening out the records in regard to typhoid inoculation, and cerebro-spinal meni

nally we went up to London and found that somebody had made a mistake and that we were su

ial character, and when I left to drive two visitors into Salisbury, the hospital dentist was making a rambling, tearful plea to a

s of our brother officers, whose call had not yet come. Everything was loaded on board the transpor

RAL M.S. M

ommanding Third

ction, June

ably be detained at the base for two or three days. Having been informed that the Hotel Tortoni was the liveliest place in town to stay, and not to go there on any account, we went and concluded that we had been the victims of a pract

had ever been in up to that time. I soon learned that French hotel bedrooms in winter have the same cold, clammy feel

h even the slightest pretence to beauty, and the rest of the city was as dull and commercial as it is possible for a seaport town to be; one can say little more than that, in consider

tish officer at the base had certainly been pleasant and proved to be a happy augury of our future relationships with them. The British officer in France i

med that we, being Canadians and more or less independent, had gone off on a little trip of our own into the interior of France. In their efforts to locate us they had telegraphed far and wide; consequently when we did arrive everybody knew of us as "The Lost Canadian Laboratory" and s

lds were being ploughed, but the ploughing and harrowing was being done by women, old men and boys. Hardly one able-bodied man was to be seen, the contrast with England in

of one's experience in France that, as we sat down to dinner that evening in an Abbeville hotel I had beside me an officer in the British army who had been in Canada for a number of years and who had, durin

with water. That we were within the sphere of military operations became more and more evident. Motor cars carrying officers passed frequently; motor transports carrying food and fodder rumbled along the roads or

of shell fire-a hole about two feet in diameter in the bricks above the door of the Hotel de Ville. As we later discovered, the village authorities had decided not to repair

a laboratory in the Hotel De Ville. This room, 22 × 36 feet, had been the banquet hall and band room, and was well lighted by windows and gas. When equipped as a laboratory it presented a most imposing appearance, and from it we had a fine view of the village sq

reached by passing through the shop, up a very steep staircase, and through a storeroom filled with boxes of soap, biscuits, bundles of brooms, and other staples. The room itself was clean but without heat, and I usually fell asleep after a couple of hours of shivering in th

the British officers we met in the field, he treated us with the greatest kindness and consideration. Faultless in dress, precise in manner, with monocle and carefully trimmed hair and moustache, he gave one the impression of just having stepped from his dressing room a