10 June, ’16.

Dear Lal, —

We are all to be inoculated again twice. Confounded nuisance. My turn is tonight, then again in ten days. . . .  In Canada and England, a great fuss is made about forty-eight hours after you’re “shot in the arm”, but that doesn’t go in France, like a jolly lot of other things. At five tonight I am going to see the keenest baseball game ever. A match has been arranged with the other No. 3 Can. Hosp. . . .  It’s a perfect day — and I feel fairly busting with good health and the joy of being alive.

Now and then something comes down the line in the way of an extraordinary wound. This morning, they drew — with the magnet — part of a Ross rifle bayonet out of a man’s shoulder. How did it get there? Shell explosion blew it in, I guess. Maybe it was his own bayonet, maybe some other fellow’s in another part of the trench.

Do you realize how much goes on in this hospital? The operating room has four tables. A fair day’s work for one doctor is thirty operations. Two stretchers do nothing all day but carry cases to the X-Ray room to locate the exact position of the piece of shell or bullet. Then there are the medical cases. The last few convoys, I have carried a fair sprinkling of Trench Fever cases. While on the subject of “patients” — you know our men now have steel helmets. Well, when you see one with a hole in it, and hear an accompanying “story”, don’t be too, too awestruck. It may have been stood on a parapet for Fritz to make a souvenir of it. Gee, what yarns we shall hear after this war!