The château was surrounded by some two or three hundred acres of well-laid-out gardens, artificial lakes, fountains, and woods. These grounds had been cut up to a certain extent by trenches, wire entanglements, dugouts, funk-holes, and gun emplacements, all in order and ready for use if the enemy should drive the French back in this direction. The fighting trenches were only three or four miles to the north of us, this château being said to be the nearest hospital to the lines in the whole theater of war. We worked, slept, ate, and killed time to the sound of the guns and shells, the latter often bursting well within a mile of us.
The really interesting part of the hospital was the personnel of the staff. There were four surgeons, a French military medical officer, Villechaise; Allwood, a Jamaican, an old college friend of mine whom I had neither seen nor heard of for twelve years until the day I arrived at the château, when he came forward to give an anesthetic for me to a case which General Berthier had ordered me to operate upon; King, a Scotsman; and myself. And we four were practically the only members of the staff who were not paying for the privilege of being allowed to serve. The rest of the staff were well-to-do society people who not only financed the institution but also did the nursing and orderly work, gave their automobiles as ambulances, and their personal servants and chauffeurs to act as servants in the hospital.
Besides the Comtesse and the Marquise, we had as nurses a niece of an ex-president of France; a grand-niece of Lord Beaconsfield; and another was a sister-in-law to Lord Something-or-other in Scotland. The latter nurse had as a pal Miss C----, who had stumped her father's constituency for him during the last general elections in England. She was a clever girl of twenty-three, an exceptionally good nurse, but oh, what a Tory. She had all the assurance of her age, and Mrs. Pankhurst in her palmiest moments could not put Lloyd George "where he belonged" as could this charming girl of twenty-three. The son of a prominent Paris lawyer, a young, black-eyed chap of seventeen who was doing his bit there till he became old enough to join the army, was one of her great admirers; and when he was not scrubbing floors or performing some other necessary work, he sometimes wrote poetry to her. The last four lines of one of his rhymes I remember: