John A. Hayward In April 1918 I volunteered to go to France in response to the urgent call for more surgeons. For twenty years I had been in general practice in a suburb, and did a fair amount of surgery among patients and at the local hospitals. I had also had some war experience as one of the surgeons at the British Red Cross Hospital, Netley, in the first six months of the War, but I had no experience of cases fresh from the battlefield, and the surgical technique which had recently been adopted in dealing with them. I had been longing throughout the War to get to the Front, and I set out full of enthusiasm and with no little pride and satisfaction to my family and myself. It was a great disappointment, after a wait of four days in Boulogne, to find that I was posted to a large Base hospital at Trouville. Here I remained till the beginning of July, not at all happy, and hampered at every turn by red tape, rules, and regulations. The hospital was full of the wastage of war – men sent down from the Front, suffering from the ordinary diseases of civil life, which should have precluded their enlistment.
