A summons to Carthage, December 1943.

I spent most of the years of the second world war serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps. In January 1939, 1 had been appointed consultant physician to the Brompton Hospital, remaining a member ofthe staff of the department of medicine at the British (now Royal) Postgraduate Medical School at Hammersmith, which I had joined at its inception in 1935. I was thus embarked on a career as a consultant physician with special interest in respiratory disease. At the outbreak of the war I was posted to the Brompton Hospital in the Emergency Medical Service, but the expected immediate air raids did not occur and, being then a bachelor, I volunteered for the RAMC. I was called up in May 1940 and was posted to Tidworth Military Hospital, where for nine months I was desperately busy as the only medical specialist on Salisbury Plain. Early in 1941 I was posted to a general hospital that was mobilising to go abroad, and I found that among my fellow officers were a thoracic surgeon and an anaesthetist with special experience of thoracic surgery. We gathered that we were to be established as a surgical chest unit when we arrived at our (then undisclosed) destination. When we arrived in Egypt, however, no one seemed to be expecting us in this capacity; and when after 18 rather frustrating months this unit was established I was not included in it but posted as officer in charge ofthe medical division ofNo 19 General Hospital sited at Fayid, about the middle of the Suez Canal. This was a splendid posting. We had 1800 beds for British and Allied forces and 1000 for prisoners of war and were in the centre of a large area ofbase units of all three services with transient populations from all over the world; we were far away from the distractions of Cairo, Alexandria, or indeed any urban area, so that we were rarely distracted by unnecessary interference from bigwigs or by what a colleague who was in a similar position in a hospital near Cairo described as "pouring out soothing syrup for the jangled nerves of brigadiers." We acquired extensive, honest to God, medical experience, especially in tropical and infectious diseases; we dealt at one time or another with nearly every important infectious disease then known, including smallpox and plague-the only exceptions were yellow fever and cholera. The hospital was located in the desert, hutted and partly tented, but as it was within a mile or so ofthe Great Bitter Lake, where there was provision for swimming and even sailing, we were better off than the several hospitals in Egypt that were in unrelieved desert areas. While the war was active in the Middle East we were desperately busy, especially in the summer months, but by the end of 1943 we were beginning to be less hard pressed and had settled down to the routine of keeping the hospital going in what was becoming a quiet backwater.