their own country, or that people should get injured by bombs or by accidents in their neighbourhood.
In order to be able to deal with such cases the first thing that you have to know is how to go out in the country and find the wounded by following their tracks to where they have crawled away to hide themselves or get water; you must know how to bind up their wounds temporarily; how to light a fire and boil up some hot soup, or fomentations for their injuries; you must be able to signal to other Scouts in the distance in order to call up help; you must be able to make a shelter out of the brush-wood around you, or to rig up a stretcher or means of carrying the injured on carts or barrows and so to get them in to hospital.
Then you have to know how to turn a room or a cellar into a ward, how to make up beds and apparatus for the use of the sick and wounded; how to nurse them; how to change their bandages; how to cook their food; what sort of ventilation is necessary; how to wash the linen and so on.
Convalescent Nursing
Finally there comes the convalescent stage when your patients are getting better, and you have to give them more nourishing food, cooked in a tempting manner, and you have to keep their minds active and cheerful by being able to read or sing to them, and so to cheer them back to life.
These are things which have to be learnt in peace-time, and because they were learnt by the Scouts beforehand,
