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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Observations of an Orderly, by Ward Muir
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Observations of an Orderly
+       Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital
+
+
+Author: Ward Muir
+
+
+
+Release Date: February 1, 2006  [eBook #17655]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Suzanne Lybarger, Irma Spehar, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net/) from
+page images generously made available by Internet Archive/Canadian
+Libraries (http://www.archive.org/details/toronto)
+
+
+
+Note: Images of the original pages are available through
+      Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries. See
+      http://www.archive.org/details/observationsorderly00muiruoft
+
+
+
+
+
+OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
+
+Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital
+
+by
+
+L.-CPL. WARD MUIR, R.A.M.C. (T.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton,
+Kent & Co., Ltd., 4 Stationers'
+Hall Court : : : London, E.C.4
+Copyright
+First published July 1917
+
+
+
+
+Novels by the Author of "Observations of an Orderly"
+
+THE AMAZING MUTES
+WHEN WE ARE RICH
+CUPID'S CATERERS
+
+Also Editor of
+
+"HAPPY--THOUGH WOUNDED"
+ The Book of the Third London General Hospital
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+LT.-COL. H.E. BRUCE PORTER, C.M.G.
+
+OFFICER IN COMMAND OF THE
+
+3RD LONDON
+
+GENERAL HOSPITAL
+
+
+
+
+Some passages from _Observations of an Orderly_ have appeared,
+generally in a shorter form, in _The Spectator_, _The New Statesman_,
+_The Hospital_, _The Evening Standard_, _The National News_, _The Dundee
+Advertiser_, _The Daily News_, and _The Daily Mail_. The author desires
+to make the usual acknowledgments to their editors.
+
+The coloured design on the paper wrapper is by Sergeant Noël Irving,
+R.A.M.C. (T.), a member of the unit at the 3rd London General Hospital.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+I                                   PAGE
+MY FIRST DAY                        19
+
+II
+LIFE IN THE ORDERLIES' HUTS         33
+
+III
+WASHING-UP                          51
+
+IV
+A "HUT" HOSPITAL                    65
+
+V
+FROM THE "D BLOCK" WARDS            79
+
+VI
+WHEN THE WOUNDED ARRIVE             93
+
+VII
+"T.... A...."                      107
+
+VIII
+LAUNDRY PROBLEMS                   121
+
+IX
+ON BUTTONS                         137
+
+X
+A WORD ABOUT "SLACKERS IN KHAKI"   147
+
+XI
+THE RECREATION ROOMS               159
+
+XII
+THE COCKNEY                        173
+
+XIII
+THE STATION PARTY                  201
+
+XIV
+SLANG IN A WAR HOSPITAL            219
+
+XV
+A BLIND MAN'S HOME-COMING          235
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+MY FIRST DAY
+
+
+The sergeant in charge of the clothing store was curt. He couldn't help
+it: he had run short of tunics, also of "pants"--except three pairs
+which wouldn't fit me, wouldn't fit anybody, unless we enlisted three
+very fat dwarfs: he had kept on asking for tunics and pants, and they'd
+sent him nothing but great-coats and water-bottles: I could take his
+word for it, he wished he was at the Front, he did, instead of in this
+blessed hole filling in blessed forms for blessed clothes which never
+came. Impossible, anyhow, to rig me out. I was going on duty, was I?
+Then I must go on duty in my "civvies."
+
+It was a disappointment. Your new recruit feels that no small item of
+his reward is the privilege of beholding himself in khaki. The escape
+from civilian clothes was, at that era, one of the prime lures to
+enlistment. I had attempted to escape before, and failed. Now at last I
+had found a branch of the army which would accept me. It needed my
+services instantly. I was to start work at once. Nothing better. I was
+ready. This was what I had been seeking for months past. But--I confess
+it--I had always pictured myself dressed as a soldier. The postponement
+of this bright vision for even twenty-four hours, now that it had seemed
+to be within my grasp, was damping. However--! The Sergeant-Major had
+told me that I was to go on duty as orderly in Ward W--an officers'
+ward--at 2 p.m. prompt. I did not know where Ward W was; I did not know
+what a ward-orderly's functions should amount to. And I had no uniform.
+I was attired in a light grey lounge suit--appropriate enough to my
+normal habit, but quite too flippant, I was certain, for a ward-orderly.
+Whatever else a ward-orderly might be, I was sure that he was not the
+sort of person to sport a grey lounge suit.
+
+Still, I must hie me to Ward W. I had got my wish. I was in the army at
+last. In the army one does not argue. One obeys. So, having been
+directed down an interminable corridor, I presented myself at Ward W.
+
+On entering--I had knocked, but no response rewarded this courtesy--I
+was requested, by a stern-visaged Sister, to state my business. Her
+sternness was excusable. The visiting-hour was not yet, and in my
+unprofessional guise she had taken me for a visitor. My explanation
+dispelled her frowns. She was expecting me. Her present orderly had been
+granted three days' leave. He was preparing to depart. I was to act as
+his substitute. Before he went he would initiate me into the secrets of
+his craft. She called him. "Private Wood!" Private Wood, in his
+shirt-sleeves, appeared. I was handed over to him.
+
+Herein I was fortunate, though I was unaware of it at the time. Private
+Wood, who was not too proud to wash dishes (which was what he had at
+that moment been doing), is a distinguished sculptor and a man of keen
+imagination. At a subsequent period that imagination was to bring forth
+the masks-for-facial-disfigurements scheme which gained him his
+commission and which has attracted world-wide notice from experts.
+Meanwhile his imagination enabled him to understand the exact extent of
+a novice's ignorance, the precise details which I did not know and must
+know, the essential apparatus I had to be shown the knack of, before he
+fled to catch his train.
+
+He devoted just five minutes, no more, to teaching me how to be a
+ward-orderly. Four of those minutes were lavished on the sink-room--a
+small apartment that enshrines cleaning appliances, the taps of which,
+if you turn them on without precautions, treat you to an involuntary
+shower bath. The sink-room contains a selection of utensils wherewith
+every orderly becomes only too familiar: their correct employment, a
+theme of many of the mildly Rabelaisian jests which are current in every
+hospital, is a mystery--until some kind mentor, like Private Wood, lifts
+the veil. In four minutes he had told me all about the sink-room, and
+all about all the gear in the sink-room and all about a variety of
+rituals which need not here be dwelt on. (The sink-room is an excellent
+place in which to receive a private lecture.) The fifth minute was spent
+in introducing me, in another room, the ward kitchen, to Mrs.
+Mappin--the scrub-lady.
+
+A scrub-lady is attached to each ward; and most wards, it should in
+justice be added, are attached to their scrub-ladies. Certainly I was to
+find that Ward W was attached to Mrs. Mappin. Mrs. Mappin was washing
+up. Private Wood had been helping her. The completion of his task he
+delegated to me. "Mrs. Mappin, this is our new orderly. He'll help you
+finish the lunch-dishes." Private Wood then slid into his tunic,
+snatched his cap from a nail in the wall, and vanished.
+
+Mrs. Mappin surveyed me. "Ah!" she sighed--she was given to sighing.
+"He's a good 'un, is Private Wood." The inference was plain. There was
+little hope of my becoming such a good 'un. In any case, my natty grey
+tweeds were against me. One could never make an orderliesque impression
+in those tweeds. "Better take your jacket off," sighed Mrs. Mappin. I
+did so, chose a dishcloth, and started to dry a pyramid of wet plates.
+For a space Mrs. Mappin meditated, her hands in soapy water. Then she
+withdrew them. "I think," she sighed, "you an' me could do with a cup of
+tea."
+
+And presently I was having tea with Mrs. Mappin.
+
+I was afterwards to learn that this practice of calling a halt in her
+labours for a cup of tea was a highly incorrect one on Mrs. Mappin's
+part, and that my share in the transaction was to the last degree
+reprehensible. But I was also to learn that faithful, selfless, honest,
+and diligent scrub-ladies are none too common; and the Sister who
+discovers that she has been allotted such a jewel as Mrs. Mappin is
+seldom foolish enough to exact from her a strict obedience to the letter
+of the law in discipline. Mrs. Mappin, in her non-tea-bibbing
+interludes, toiled like a galley-slave, was rigidly punctual, and never
+complained. Her sighs were no index of her character. They were not a
+symptom of ennui (though possibly--if the suggestion be not rude--of
+indigestion caused by tannin poisoning). She was the best-tempered of
+creatures. It is a fact that if I had been so disposed I need never have
+given Mrs. Mappin any assistance, though it was within my province to do
+so. She would, without a murmur, shoulder other people's jobs as well as
+her own. Having finished with bearing children (one was at the Front--it
+was Mrs. Mappin who, on being asked the whereabouts of her soldier son,
+said, "'E's in France; I don't rightly know w'ere the place is, but it's
+_called_ 'Dugout'"), she had settled down, for the remainder of her
+sojourn on this plane, to a prospect of work, continuous work. A little
+more or a little less made no difference to her. She had nothing else to
+do, but work; nothing else to be interested in, except work--and her
+children's progress, and her cups of tea. Her ample figure concealed a
+warm heart. Behind her wrinkled old face there was a brain with a
+limited outfit of ideas--and the chief of those ideas was _work_.
+
+Our cup of tea was refreshing, but it would be incorrect to convey the
+notion that I was allowed to linger over such a luxury. There are few
+intervals for leisure in the duty-hours of an orderly in an officers'
+ward. Had the Sister and her nurses not been occupied elsewhere, I doubt
+whether I should have been free to drink that cup of tea at all--a
+circumstance of which perhaps Mrs. Mappin was more aware than I. At any
+rate the call of "Orderly!" from a patient summoned me from the kitchen
+and into the ward long before I had finished drying Mrs. Mappin's
+dishes.
+
+The patient desired some small service performed for him. I performed
+it--remembering to address him as "Sir." Various other patients,
+observing my presence, took the opportunity to hail me. I found myself
+saying "Yes, Sir!" "In a moment, Sir!" and dropping--with a promptitude
+on which I rather flattered myself--into the manner of a cross between a
+valet and a waiter, with a subtle dash of chambermaid. Soon I was also a
+luggage-porter, staggering to a taxi with the ponderous impedimenta of a
+juvenile second lieutenant who was bidding the hospital farewell, and
+whose trunks contained--at a guess--geological specimens and battlefield
+souvenirs in the shape of "dud" German shells. This young gentleman
+fumbled with a gratuity, then thought better of it--and was gracious
+enough to return my grin. "Bit awkward, tipping, in these days," he
+apologised cheerily, depositing himself in his taxi behind ramparts of
+holdalls. "Thank you, Sir," seemed the suitable adieu, and having
+proffered it I scampered into the ward again. Anon Sister sent me with a
+message to the dispensary. Where the dispensary was I knew not. But I
+found out, and brought back what she required. Then to the post office.
+Another exploration down that terrific corridor. Post office located at
+last and duly noted. Then to the linen store to draw attention to an
+error in the morning's supply of towels. Linen store eventually
+unearthed--likewise the information that its staff disclaimed all
+responsibility for mistakes--likewise the first inkling of a profound
+maxim, that when a mistake has been made, in hospital, it is always the
+orderly, and no one else, who has made it.
+
+Engaged on these errands, and a host of intervening lesser exploits in
+the ward, I had to cultivate an unwonted fleetness of foot. I flew. So
+did the time. Almost immediately, as it seemed to me, I was bidden to
+serve afternoon tea to our patients. The distribution of bed-tables, of
+cups, of bread-and-butter (most of which, also, I cut); the "A little
+more tea, Sir?" or, "A pot of jam in your locker, Sir, behind the pair
+of trousers?... Yes, here it is, Sir"; the laborious feeding of a
+patient who could not move his arms;--all these occupied me for a
+breathless hour. Then an involved struggle with a patient who had to be
+lifted from a bath-chair into bed. (I had never lifted a human being
+before.) Then a second bout of washing-up with Mrs. Mappin. Then a
+nominal half-an-hour's respite for my own tea--actually ten minutes, for
+I was behindhand. Then, all too soon, more waitering at the ceremony of
+Dinner: this time with the complication that some of my patients were
+allowed wine, beer, or spirits, and some were not. "Burgundy, Sir?"
+"Whiskey-and-soda, Sir?" I ran round the table of the sitting-up
+patients, displaying (I was pleased to think) the complete aplomb and
+nimbleness of a thoroughbred Swiss _garçon_, pouring out drinks--with
+concealed envy--placing and removing plates, handing salt, bread,
+serviettes.... After which, back to Mrs. Mappin and her renewed mountain
+of once-more-to-be-washed-and-dried crockery.
+
+It was long after my own supper hour had come and gone that I was able
+to say au revoir to the ward. The cleansing of the grease-encrusted
+meat-tin was a travail which alone promised to last half the night.
+(Mrs. Mappin eventually lent me her assistance, and later I became more
+adroit.) And the calls of "Orderly!" from the bed patients were
+interruptions I could not ignore. But at last some sort of conclusion
+was reached. Mrs. Mappin put on her bonnet. The night orderly, who was
+to relieve me, was overdue. Sister, discovering me still in the kitchen,
+informed me that I might leave.
+
+"You ain't 'ad any supper, 'ave you?" said Mrs. Mappin. "You won't get
+none now, neither. Should 'ave done a bunk a full hower back, you
+should."
+
+She drew me into the larder, and indicated the debris of our patients'
+repast. "A leg of chicken and some rice pudden. Only wasted if _you_
+don't 'ave it."
+
+"But is it allowed--?" I was, in truth, not only tired but ravenous.
+
+Sister, entering upon this conspiratorial dialogue, unhesitatingly gave
+her approval.
+
+Cold rice pudding and a left-over leg of chicken, eaten standing, at a
+shelf in a larder, can taste very good indeed, even to the wearer of a
+spick-and-span grey lounge suit. I shall know in future what it means
+when my restaurant waiter emerges from behind the screened service-door
+furtively wiping his mouth. I sympathise. I too have wolfed the choice
+morsels from the banquet of my betters.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+LIFE IN THE ORDERLIES' HUTS
+
+
+In May, 1915, when I enlisted, the weather was beautiful. Consequently
+the row of tin huts, to which I was introduced as my future address "for
+the duration," wore an attractive appearance. The sun shone upon their
+metallic sides and roofs. The shimmering foliage of tall trees, and a
+fine field of grass, which made a background to the huts, were fresh and
+green and restful to the eye. Even the foreground of hard-trodden
+earth--the barrack square--was dry and clean, betraying no hint of its
+quagmire propensities under rain. Later on, when winter came, the
+cluster of huts could look dismal, especially before dawn on a wet
+morning, when the bugle sounding parade had dragged us from warm beds;
+or in an afternoon thaw after snow, when the corrugated eaves wept
+torrents in the twilight, and one's feet (despite the excellence of army
+boots) were chilled by their wadings through slush. Meanwhile, however,
+the new recruit had nothing to complain of in the aspect of the housing
+accommodation which was offered him. Merely for amusement's sake he had
+often "roughed it" in quarters far less comfortable than these bare but
+well-built huts--which even proved, on investigation, to contain beds:
+an unexpected luxury.
+
+"I'll put you in Hut 6," said the Sergeant-Major. "There's one empty
+bed. It's the hut at the end of the line."
+
+Thereafter Hut 6 was my home--and I hope I may never have a less
+pleasant one or less good company for room-mates. In these latter I was
+perhaps peculiarly fortunate. But that is by the way. It suffices that
+twenty men, not one of whom I had ever seen before, welcomed a total
+stranger, and both at that moment and in the long months which were to
+elapse before various rearrangements began to scatter us, proved the
+warmest of friends.
+
+Twenty-one of us shared our downsittings and our uprisings in Hut 6.
+There might have been an even number, twenty-two, but one bed's place
+was monopolised by a stove (which in winter consumed coke, and in summer
+was the repository of old newspapers and orange-peel). The hut,
+accordingly, presented a vista of twenty-one beds, eleven along one wall
+and ten along the other, the stove and its pipe being the sole
+interruption of the symmetrical perspective. Above the beds ran a
+continuous shelf, bearing the hut-inhabitants' equipment, or at least
+that portion of it--great-coat, water-bottle, mess-tin, etc.--not
+continually in use. Below each bed its owner's box and his boots were
+disposed with rigid precision at an exact distance from the box and
+boots beneath the adjacent bed. In the ceiling hung two electric lights.
+These, with the stove, beds, shelves, boxes and boots, constituted the
+entire furniture of the hut--unless you count an alarm-clock, bought by
+public subscription, and notable for a trick of tinkling faintly, as
+though wanting to strike but failing, in the watches of the night, hours
+before its appointed minute had arrived. The hut contained no other
+furniture whatever, and in those days did not seem to us to require any.
+In the autumn, when the daylight shortened and we could no longer hold
+our parliaments on a bench outside, a couple of deck-chairs were
+mysteriously imported; and, as the authorities remained unshocked, a
+small table also appeared and was squeezed into a gap beside the stove.
+Some sybarite even goaded us into getting up a fund for a strip of
+linoleum to be laid in the aisle between the beds. This was done--I do
+not know why, for personally I have no objection to bare boards. I
+suppose linoleum is easier to keep clean than wood; and that aisle,
+tramped on incessantly by hobnail boots which in damp weather were, as
+to their soles and heels, mere bulbous trophies of the alluvial deposits
+of the neighbourhood, was sometimes far from speckless. But to me the
+strip of linoleum made our hut look remotely like a real room in a real
+house: it was a touch of the conventional which I never cared for, and I
+only subscribed to it when I had voted against it and been overborne. An
+extraordinary proposition, that we should inaugurate a plant in a pot
+on the stove's lid in summer, was, I am glad to say, negatived. It would
+have been the thin end of the wedge ... we might have arrived at
+Japanese fans and photograph-frames on the walls.
+
+Not that our Company Officer would have tolerated any nonsense of that
+kind. Punctually at eight-thirty, after the second parade of the day, he
+marched through each hut, inspecting it and calling the attention of the
+Sergeant-Major to any detail which offended his sense of fitness. On wet
+mornings, instead of parading outside, each man stood to his cot, and
+thus the comments of the Company Officer, as he went down the aisle,
+were audible to all. Stiffly drawn up to attention, we wondered
+anxiously whether he would notice anything wrong with our buttons, boots
+or belts, or whether he would "spot" the books and jam jars hidden
+behind our overcoats on the shelves. Nothing so decadent and civilian as
+a book--and certainly nothing so unsightly as a jam jar--must be visible
+on your barrack-room shelf. It is sacred to equipment, and particularly
+to the folded great-coat.
+
+"The Art of Folding" might have been the title of the first lesson of
+the many so good-naturedly imparted to me by my new comrades. There was,
+I learnt, a right way and a wrong way to fold all things foldable. The
+great-coat, for instance, must at the finish of its foldings, when it is
+placed upon the exactly middle spot above your bed's end, present to the
+eye of the beholder a kind of flat-topped pyramid whose waist-line (if a
+pyramid can be said to own a waist) is marked by the belt with the three
+polished buttons peeping through. The belt must bulge neither to the
+right nor to the left; the pyramidal edifice of great-coat must not
+loll--it must sit up prim and firm. And unless all your foldings of the
+great-coat, from first to last, have, been deftly precise, no pyramid
+will reward you, but a flabby trapezium: the belt will sag, its buttons
+won't come centrally, and indeed the whole edifice of unwieldy cloth
+will topple off its perch on the narrow shelf--which was designed to
+refuse all lodgment for the property of persons who had unsound ideas
+on the subject of compact storage.
+
+The second series of folderies to which the novice was initiated
+concerned themselves with his bedding. This consisted of a mattress,
+three blankets and a pillow. It is an outfit at which no one need turn
+up his nose. I never spent a bad night in army blankets, though when out
+on leave I am sometimes a victim of insomnia between clean cold sheets.
+But the moment the Réveillé uplifted you from your couch, that couch had
+to be made ship-shape according to rule. No finicky "airing"! The
+mattress must be rolled up, with the pillow as its core, and placed at
+the end of the bed. On top of it a blanket, folded longwise and with the
+ends hanging down, was laid neatly; on top of _that_ you put the other
+two blankets, folded quite otherwise; then you brought the first
+blanket's ends over, and reversed the resultant bundle and pressed it
+down into a thin stratified parallelogram with oval ends. The strata of
+the said parallelogram, viewed from the aisle, must show no blanket
+_edges_, only curves of the blankets' folds: the edges (if visible at
+all) must face inwards, not outwards. Correct folding, to be sure, gave
+no visible edges, viewed from either side; and, once you caught the
+knack, correct folding was just as easy as incorrect--though there were
+temperaments which did not find it so and which rebelled against these
+niceties.
+
+I was afterwards to learn that this mania for matching (if mania be
+indeed a legitimate word for a custom based on common-sense principles
+and seldom carried to the extremes which the recruit has been led to
+fear) obtains not only in the army but also in the nursing profession.
+Not long after I became a ward orderly I got a wigging from my "Sister"
+because I had not noticed that every pillow-case of a ward's beds must
+face towards the same point of the compass: the pillows on the vista of
+beds must be placed in such a manner that the pillow-case mouths are,
+all of them, turned away from anyone entering the ward's door. Similarly
+the overlap of the counterpanes must all be of exactly the same depth
+and caught up at exactly the same angle, the resulting series of pairs
+of triangles all ending at exactly the same spot in each bedstead. These
+trifles reveal at a glance the professional touch in a ward, and are, I
+understand, not by any means the insignia of a military as distinct from
+a civilian hospital. They may or may not contribute to the comfort of
+the patient, but they betoken the captaincy of one whose methodicalness
+will in other and less visible respects most emphatically benefit him.
+
+Our hut life was something more than a mere folding-up of bedding on
+bedsteads and great-coats on shelves. After midday dinner it was
+allowable to unroll the mattress, make the bed, and rest thereon--which
+most of us by that time (having been on the run since 6 o'clock parade)
+were very ready to do. There was half an hour to spare before 2 o'clock
+parade, and a precious half-hour it was. Snores rose from some of the
+beds where students of the war had collapsed beneath the newspapers
+which they had meant to read. Desultory conversation enlivened those
+corners where the denizens of the hut were energetic enough to polish
+their boots or sew on buttons. The one or two men who happened to be
+"going out on pass"--we were allowed one afternoon per week--were
+putting on their puttees and brushing-up the metal buttons of their
+walking-out tunics (otherwise known as their Square Push Suits). The
+buttons of their working tunics had of course been burnished before
+parade. The correct employment of button-sticks and of the magic cleaner
+called Soldier's Friend; the polishing of one's out-of-use boots and
+their placing, on the floor, with tied laces, and with their toes in
+line with the bed's legs; the substitution of lost braces' buttons by
+"bulldogs"; the furbishing of one's belt; the propping-up of the front
+of one's cap with wads of paper in the interior of the crown; the
+devices whereby non-spiral puttees can be coaxed into a resemblance of
+spiral ones and caused to ascend in corkscrews above trousers which
+refuse to tuck unlumpily into one's socks--these, and a host of other
+matters, always kept a proportion of the hut-dwellers awake and busy and
+loquacious even in the somnolent post-prandial half-hour before 2
+o'clock.
+
+But it was at night, at bedtime, that the hut became generally sociable.
+Lights-Out sounded at 10.15; and at 10.10 we were all scrambling into
+our pyjamas. In winter our disrobing was hasty; in summer it was an
+affair of leisure, and deshabille roamings to and fro in the aisle, and
+gossip. When the bugle blew and the electric lights suddenly ceased to
+glow, leaving the hut in a darkness broken only by the dim shapes of the
+windows and the red of cigarette-ends, many of us still had to complete
+our undressing. We became adepts at doing this in the dark and so
+disposing of the articles of our attire that they could be instantly
+retrieved in the morning. Once between the blankets, conversation at
+first waxed rather than waned. The Night Wardmaster, whose duty it was
+to make the round of the orderlies' huts, disapproved of conversation
+after Lights-Out, and was apt to say so, loudly and menacingly, when he
+surprised us by popping his head in at the door. But--well--the Night
+Wardmaster always departed in the long run.... And then uprose, between
+bed and bed, those unconclusive debates in which the masculine soul
+delighteth: Theology; Woman; Victuals; Politics; Art; the Press; Sport;
+Marriage; Money--and sometimes even The War; likewise the purely local
+topics of Sisters and their Absurdities; Our Officers; The Other Huts;
+What the Sergeant-Major Said; Why V.A.D.'s can't replace Male Orderlies;
+What this Morning's Operations Looked Like; Whether an Officers' Ward or
+a Men's Ward is the nicer; Who Deserves Stripes; C.O.'s Parade and its
+Terrors; Advantages of Volunteering for Night Duty; The Cushy Job of
+being in charge of a Sham Lunacy Case; Other Cushy Jobs less cushy than
+They Sounded; and so forth; until at last protests began to be voiced by
+the wearier folk who wanted silence.
+
+Silence it was, except for the thunder of occasional passing trains in
+the near-by railway cutting. These had little power to disturb. Tucked
+in the brown army blankets, which at first sight look so hard and so
+prickly, we slumbered, the twenty-one of us, as one man; until, with a
+cruel jolt, at 5.15 that wretched alarm-clock crashed forth its summons
+for the fastidious few who liked to rise in ample time to bath and shave
+before early parade. Sometimes I was of that virtuous band, and
+sometimes I wasn't; but, either way, I hated the alarm-clock at
+5.15,--though not so virulently as did those members of the hut who
+never by any chance dreamt of rising until five to six. These gentry had
+reduced the ritual of dressing, and of rolling up their bedding, to a
+speed at which it might almost be compared to expert juggling: the
+quickness of the hand deceived the eye. At five minutes to six you would
+see the juggler asleep on his pillow, in blissful innocence; at six he
+would be on parade, as correctly attired as you were yourself, and
+having left behind him, in the hut, a bed as neatly folded as yours. The
+world is sprinkled with people who can do this kind of thing--and our
+hut was blessed with its due leaven of them. But I would not assert that
+they _never_ had to put some finishing touches, either to their dress
+or to their hut equipment foldings, before the Company Officer's tour of
+inspection at 8.30. It sufficed that they would pass muster at 6
+o'clock, when appearances are less minutely important. And the man who
+never rises till 5.55 detests an alarm-clock that whirrs at 5.15. The
+hour at which the alarm-clock should be set to detonate was one of our
+few acrimonious subjects of argument: I have even known it upset a
+discussion on Woman. But the early risers had their way, and the clock
+continued to be set for half an hour in front of Réveillé.
+
+The harsh vibration of the alarm at one end of the day, and the expiry
+of the Lights-Out talks at the other--these events marked the chief
+time-divisions in our hut life. While we were absent at work, our
+interests were many and scattered; but the hut was a nucleus for
+communal bonds of union which evoked no little loyalty and affection
+from us all. On the May morning when I first beheld that corrugated-iron
+abode I thought it looked inviting enough; but I did not guess how fond
+I was to grow of its barn-like interior and of the sportive crew who
+shared its mathematically-allotted floor-space. "Next war," one optimist
+suggested during a typical Lights-Out séance, "let's all enlist together
+again." There were protests against the implied prophecy, but none
+against the proposition as such. That is the spirit of hut comradeship
+... a spirit which no alarm-clock controversies can do aught to impair;
+for though 5.15 a.m. is an hour to test the temper of a troop of
+twenty-one saints, 10.15 p.m. will bring geniality and garrulousness to
+twenty-one sinners.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+WASHING-UP
+
+
+The following substances (to which I had previously been almost a
+stranger) absorbed much of my interest during my first months as a
+hospital orderly:
+
+Coagulated pudding, mutton fat and beef fat, cold gravy, treacle,
+congealed cocoa, suet duff, skins of once hot milk:
+
+Plates, cups, frying-pans and other utensils smeared with the above:
+
+Knives, forks and spoons, ditto.
+
+I am fated to go through life, in the future, not merely with an exalted
+opinion of scullery-maids--this I should not regret--but also with an
+only too clear picture, when at the dinner table, of the adventures of
+each dish of broken meats on its exit from view. I have been behind the
+scenes at the business of eating, or rather, at the dreadful repairs
+which must be instituted when the business of eating is concluded in
+order that the business of eating may recommence.
+
+There were days when the ward-kitchen was to me a battlefield and I
+seemed to be fighting on the losing side. This was when our scrub-lady
+was ill or had "got the sack" and it fell to me, the orderly, to do the
+washing-up single-handed. Those patients who were well enough to be on
+their feet were supposed to help. (I speak of a men's ward, of course,
+not an officers'.) They did help, and that right willingly. Sometimes I
+was blessed by the presence of a patient with a passion for cleaning
+things. When there were no dishes to clean he would clean taps. When the
+taps shone like gold he would clean the hooks on the dresser. When all
+our kitchen gear was clean he would invade, with a kind of fury, the
+sink-room and clean the apparatus there. When this was done he would
+clean the ward's windows and door handles. Between-times he would clean
+his boots and shave patients in bed. The new army is thickly sown with
+men like that. They are the salt of the earth. I would place them at the
+summit of the commonwealth's salary list, the bank clerk second, and the
+business man, the artist and the politician at the bottom. At all events
+these were my sentiments when a patient of this type, convalescing,
+began to be able to help me with my kitchen chores. But it occasionally
+chanced that every single patient in the ward was confined to bed. It
+was then that I made my most intimate acquaintance with the catalogue of
+horrors I have cited.
+
+You behold me, with my shirt-sleeves rolled up, faced by a heap of
+twenty plates, twenty forks, twenty knives and twenty spoons, all
+urgently requiring washing. Were these my whole task I should not
+shrink. They would be nicely polished-off long ere one-fifteen
+arrived--the time when I should (but probably shall not be able to)
+leave for my own meal in the orderlies' mess. But there are two far more
+serious opponents waiting to be subdued--the dinner-tin and the
+pudding-basin. This pair are hateful beyond words. Their memory will
+for ever haunt me, a spectral disillusionment to spoil the relish of
+every repast I may consume in the years that are ahead.
+
+The dinner-tin was a rectangular box some three feet long, twenty inches
+wide and six inches deep. It was made of solid metal, was fitted with a
+false bottom to contain hot water, and was divided internally into three
+compartments to hold meat, vegetables and duff. These viands were loaded
+into the tin at the hospital's central kitchen. I had naught to do with
+the cookery--which I may mention always seemed to me to be excellent. My
+sole concern was with the helping-out of the food to the patients and
+the restoration of the dinner-tin to its shelf in the central kitchen.
+For unless I restored that tin in a faultless state of cleanliness, the
+sergeant in charge of the central kitchen would require my blood. The
+tin's number would betray me. The sergeant needed not to know my name:
+all he had to do, on discovering the questionable tin, was to glance at
+its number and then send for the orderly of the ward with a
+corresponding number.
+
+He was a sergeant whose aspect could be very daunting. I never had to
+come before him on the subject of a dirty dinner-tin. But he and I had
+some small passages concerning "specials" (separate diets ordered for
+patients requiring delicacies). Sometimes the necessary forms for the
+specials had been incorrectly made out by a Sister with no head for army
+accuracy in minor clerical details. Thereafter it was my unlucky place
+to see the sergeant, and put the matter straight with him. I have
+survived those encounters. I have survived them with an enhanced respect
+for the sergeant and the organisation of his large and by no means
+simple department. There were moments, nevertheless, when I approached
+his presence with a sinking heart. For if I failed to "get round" him in
+the matter of coaxing another special for a patient, there was Sister to
+placate on my return to the ward; and it was quite impossible to
+persuade Sister that she could have made a mistake with her diet sheets,
+or, if she had, that it was of any consequence.
+
+The dinner-tin was somewhat larger than the sink in which I was supposed
+to wash it. It was also very heavy. When full of food, and its false
+bottom charged with hot water, I could only just lift it, and my
+progress down the ward, carrying it from the trolley in the corridor to
+the ward-kitchen, was a perilous and perspiring shuffle. As soon as all
+the patients had been served I placed any left-over slices of meat in
+the larder: these would be eaten at tea. Then I drained out the hot
+water from the false bottom. Then (but only after experience had given
+me wisdom) I ran hot water from the geyser tap into the now empty meat,
+vegetable and duff compartments, and gave them a hurried swill: this to
+rid them of the pestilent dregs of fatty material which would otherwise
+have dried and glued themselves to the floor of the tin. The latter had
+now to be put on one side, for I must be back in the ward attending to
+my diners. Only when they had finished their meal, and their bed-tables
+had been removed, folded up and placed neatly behind each bed, could I
+tackle the tin in earnest.
+
+I abhor dabbling in grease; but life is full of abhorrent dilemmas which
+must be endured; and the interior of that dinner-tin somehow got itself
+cleaned, every day, in the long run. During the early part of any given
+week I was almost happy over the job. For Monday was "Dry Store" day. On
+Monday, and on Monday only--and you were helpless for the remainder of
+the week if you forgot the rule--you could obtain, on presentation of a
+chit, blacklead for the stoves, metal-polish for the brass, rags for
+cleaning the floor, floor-polish, one box of matches, bath-brick, soft
+soap, and--soda. It is an extraordinary chemical, soda. Before I became
+a ward orderly I had no idea of the remarkable properties of soda. A
+handful of soda in boiling water, and behold the grease dissolve meekly
+from the nastiest dinner-tin! It was miraculous. When a pitying
+scrub-lady first showed me the trick I thought that all my troubles were
+at an end. Soda made the ward-kitchen seem like heaven. Alas, the
+supply of soda considered sufficient by the Dry Store authorities never
+lasted beyond Wednesday. On Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday the
+dinner-tin had to be cleaned out not by alkaline agency, but by sheer
+slogging hard labour. And when at last I stood it on edge to dry, and
+thought to go off duty with a clear conscience, I generally found that I
+had overlooked the waiting pudding-basin.
+
+On the whole I am inclined to pronounce the pudding-basin a more
+obdurate utensil than even the dinner-tin. The pudding-basin, however,
+only appeared every second morning. On duff days (duff being served in
+the same tin as the meat and vegetables, though in a separate
+compartment) we had no pudding. By pudding I mean milk pudding--rice or
+sago or tapioca. Now a milk pudding, such as those my patients received,
+though perhaps it was looked askance at in the nursery, is food which,
+as an adult, I am far from despising. Rice pudding I have come with
+maturer years to regard as a delicacy. Sago and tapioca I still eat
+rather with amiable resignation than from choice. But any milk pudding,
+as I now know, has a most vicious habit of cleaving to the dish in which
+it was cooked. Rice is the least evil offender. The others are
+absolutely wicked. To clean oleaginous scum from a dinner-tin is not
+easy, but it is a mere bagatelle compared with cleaning the scorched
+high-tide-mark of tapioca or sago from the shores of a large metal
+pudding-basin. I have tried scraping with a knife blade, I have tried
+every reasonable form of friction, and I can simply state as a fact from
+my own personal experience (perhaps I am unfortunate) that those metal
+pudding-basins of ours would frequently yield to nothing less powerful
+than sandpaper.
+
+I need scarcely say that sandpaper was not supplied by the deities of
+the Dry Store. Sandpaper did not come within their purview. It had no
+recognised use in hospital. Therefore it did not exist. But, observing
+that a succession of metal pudding-basins would be an insupportable
+prospect without sandpaper, I laid in a stock of sandpaper, paying for
+the same out of my own private purse. It was a cheap investment. Never
+have earnings of mine been better spent. Moreover, having once hit on
+the notion of giving myself a lift illegitimately, so to speak, I added
+to the smuggling-in of sandpaper a secret purchase of soda. Except that
+our scrub-ladies, each and all, discovering that the Dry Store's
+allowance of this priceless chemical had at last apparently been
+generous, caused it to fly at a disconcerting pace, and as a result
+sometimes left me short of it, my career as a washer-up afterwards
+became more comfortable.
+
+I shall never like washing-up. In the communal households of the future
+I shall heave coal, sift cinders, dig potatoes, dust furniture or scour
+floors--any task will be mine which, though it makes me dirty, does not
+make me greasily dirty. But if I must wash-up, if I must study the
+idiosyncrasies of cold fat, treacly plates, frying-pans which have
+sizzled dripping-toast on the gas-ring, frozen gravy, and pudding-basins
+with burnt milk-skins filmed to their sides, I shall be comparatively
+undismayed. For sandpaper is not yet (like the news posters) abolished;
+and soda--although I hear its price has risen several hundred per
+cent.--is still cheaper than, say, diamonds.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+A "HUT" HOSPITAL
+
+
+People have curious ideas of the kind of building which would make a
+good war hospital. "The So-and-So Club in Pall Mall," I have been told,
+"should have been commandeered long ago. Ideal for hospital purposes. Of
+course some of the M.P. members brought influence to bear, and the War
+Office was choked off...." And so forth.
+
+It would surprise me to hear of anything that the War Office was held
+back from doing if it wanted to do it. Perhaps the least likely
+obstructionist to be successful in this project would be a
+club-frequenting M.P. The War Office has taken exactly and precisely
+what it chose--even when it would have been better to choose otherwise.
+In this matter of commandeering buildings for hospitals it may or may
+not have acted with wisdom; but at least it has been safe in avoiding
+the advice of the individual who jumps to the conclusion that just any
+pleasingly-situated edifice will do, provided beds and nurses are
+shovelled into it in sufficient quantities.
+
+The indignant patriot who was convinced that chicane alone saved the
+So-and-So Club from being dedicated to the service of the wounded was
+quite unable to tell me whether the lifts--assuming that lifts
+existed--were roomy enough to accommodate stretchers; whether, if so, no
+interval of stairs prevented trollies from being wheeled to every ward;
+whether the arrangement of the building would allow of the network of
+plumbing necessitated by the introduction of numerous bathrooms and
+lavatories (for each ward must possess both); whether the kitchens were
+so located that they could supply food to top-floor patients without
+waste of carrying labour on the part of the orderlies' staff. These
+problems, the mere fringe of the subject, had never occurred to our
+patriot. His idea of a hospital was a place where soldiers lie in bed
+and get well. (What queer notions visitors absorb of the _easiness_ of
+hospital life!) He had not glimpsed the organisation which made the cure
+possible. The man in bed, a Sister hovering in the background with,
+apparently, nothing to do but look pleasant--these constituted, for him,
+the final phenomena of a war hospital. These phenomena, instead of being
+housed in a wood-and-corrugated-iron shed, might have been staged
+picturesquely in one of the luxurious salons of the So-and-So Club in
+Pall Mall. It was a shame that they weren't. He would write to the
+papers about it. Somebody must be blamed, somebody must be made to
+hustle. And meanwhile the Sisters and doctors who _were_ installed in
+gorgeous mansions for their work were openly envying the fortunate ones
+who had been given those bare but efficient and compactly-planned sheds.
+
+Some years ago a number of public buildings were earmarked for hospital
+use in case of war. It may surprise the indignant patriots to learn that
+any preparations whatever were made prior to the outbreak in 1914.
+Nevertheless all kinds of preparations actually were made. Mistakes and
+miscalculations may have marred those preparations: the fact remains
+that, as far as the Territorial Medical Service was concerned, the
+authorities had merely to press a button and hospitals came into
+existence. Thus a number of institutions--mostly schools--found
+themselves ejected from their own roof-trees: found, in short, (what
+many other folk were to learn later) that the State is omnipotent in
+war-time and that sectional interests fade into insignificance compared
+with the interests of the safety of the commonwealth. Some conception of
+the promptness with which this paper scheme of Sir Alfred Keogh's
+materialised at the outbreak of war may be gathered from the simple
+statement that the building of which I myself write was an Orphans' Home
+on August 4th, 1914. At 6 a.m. on August 5th it was a military hospital.
+
+I do not say that it was a military hospital in working order. But if,
+by a miracle, wounded _had_ turned up then, there was at least a staff
+of medical officers and orderlies on the premises to receive them. In
+point of fact it was some weeks before the first patients arrived. Those
+weeks, however, were not idle ones. The layman who considers that any
+large building can be turned instantaneously into a hospital would have
+had an eye-opener if he had witnessed the work done here. The mere
+removing of 95 per cent. of the institution's furniture was a colossal
+task; added thereto was the introduction of hundreds of beds, hundreds
+of mattresses, hundreds of sets of bedclothes, hundreds of suits of
+pyjamas, hundreds of--But why prolong a brain-racking list? Then there
+was the pulling-down and fixing-up of partitions, the removal of every
+single window for replacement by Hopper sashes, the fitting-in of
+bathrooms, lavatories, ward-kitchens, sink-rooms, dispensary, cookhouse,
+operating-theatre, pathological laboratory, linen-store, steward's
+store, clothing-store, detention-room, administration offices, X-ray
+department ... all these in a building which, spacious and handsome
+outwardly, was, as to its interior, a characteristic maze in the
+Scottish baronial style of architecture beloved by mid-Victorian
+philanthropists. How the evicted orphans will like to return to those
+stone-flagged passages and large airy dormitories, after having
+experienced the comforts of the banal but snug suburban villas in which
+they are at present located, I know not. There is a certain dignity
+about the Scottish baronial pile, I admit. The silhouette of its grey
+stone façade, rising above delightful lawns, makes a good
+impression--from a distance. Postcard views of it sell freely to
+visitors. But the best part of our hospital is hidden behind that
+turreted façade, and is much too "ugly" and utilitarian for postcard
+immortalisation.
+
+The best part of our hospital--_the_ hospital, to most of us--came into
+being when the commandeered Scottish baronial orphans' asylum was found
+to be too small. Then were built "the huts."
+
+The word "hut" suggests something casual, of the camping-out order: a
+shed knocked together with tin-tacks, doubtfully weather-proof and
+probably scamped by profiteering contractors. Of the huts provided at
+certain training centres this may have been true. The finely austere
+and efficient ranks of hut-wards which constitute the main part of the
+3rd London General Hospital are the very antithesis of that picture.
+They may look flimsy. They were certainly put up at a remarkable pace. I
+myself witnessed the erection of the final fifty of them. An open field
+vanished in less than a month, and "Bungalow Town" (as someone nicknamed
+it) appeared. You would have said that such speed meant countless
+imperfections of detail. No doubt some tinkerings and modifications were
+bound to follow, when the regiment of workmen, carpenters, engineers,
+drainage specialists, electricians, had vanished. But, in the long run,
+the ideal hospital remained--a hospital with which the So-and-So Club in
+Pall Mall, for all its luxuriousness, could never hope to compare.
+
+There are still a dozen wards--used mostly for medical cases--in the
+Scottish baronial building. Its rooms, too, provide the Administration
+with offices. Its great Dining Hall is a splendid Receiving Ward for the
+sorting-out and clearance of newly-arrived convoys of patients. We
+should be poorly situated indeed if we had not our Scottish baronial
+main building to be the hub of the hospital's activities, or rather the
+handle from which springs the fan of the hospital's great extension--the
+huts. Approaching the hospital the visitor sees nothing of those huts.
+As he walks up the drive he flatters himself that he has reached his
+destination. He discovers his mistake when, at the inquiry bureau in the
+entrance, he is informed that the patient whom he has come to interview
+is (say) in "C 13." He is advised to go down the passage on his left,
+turn to his right, turn to the left again and then again to the
+right--after which he had better seek a further re-direction. Launching
+himself optimistically on this voyage he learns, long ere he has
+attained his goal, that a modern war-hospital can hide a considerable
+extent of pedestrianism behind a comparatively short Scottish baronial
+frontage. He will be fortunate if five minutes' steady tramping brings
+him to the bedside of his friend in C 13.
+
+Perhaps he will content himself in his footsoreness by noting that, to
+reach C 13, he has not had to go up or down any stairs. This is one of
+the beauties of the hut system. It consumes a big area, but it is all
+on one level--the ground level. The patient on crutches can go anywhere
+without fear of tripping, the patient in a wheeled chair can propel
+himself anywhere, the orderlies can push wheeled stretchers or
+dinner-wagons anywhere. Our visitor for C 13, having escaped from the
+back of the Scottish baronial building, emerges into a vista of covered
+corridors, wooden-floored, galvanised-iron roofed. It is a heartbreaking
+vista to the poor woman who has had no bus-fare and is burdened by a
+baby in arms. It is a vista which seems to have no end. Corridor
+branches out of corridor--A Corridor, B Corridor, C Corridor, D
+Corridor, each with its perspective of doors opening into wards; and
+shorter corridors leading to store-rooms and the like. But the patient
+or orderly who has dwelt in a hospital where, though distances are
+shorter, staircases are involved--or where every trifling
+coming-and-going of goods or stretchers necessitates the manipulation of
+a lift--blesses those level, smooth corridors, with their facile access
+to any ward, to operating theatres, kitchens, stores, X-ray room,
+massage department, etc., and their stepless exit into the open air.
+
+Looked at from outside, a hut-ward is--to the æsthetic eye--a hideous
+structure. Knowing what it stands for, the science, the tenderness and
+the fundamental civilisation which it represents, we may descry, behind
+its stark geometrical outlines, a real nobility and beauty. Entering a
+typical hut-ward you behold thirty beds, fifteen on each side of the
+room. Between each pair of beds is a locker in which the patient stows
+his belongings. (Woe betide him if his locker is not kept neat!) In the
+central aisle of the room are the Sister's writing-table, certain other
+tables, chairs, and two coke stoves for heating purposes in winter. The
+floor is carpetless, and maintained in a meticulous state of high gloss
+by means of daily polishings. At a height of a few feet from the floor,
+the asbestos-lined walls cease and become windows. There is no gap in
+the continuous line of windows all down each side of the ward--a special
+type of window which, even when open, declines to allow rain to enter.
+In consequence of these windows the ward is not only very well lit, but
+also airy and odourless. When all the windows are open (which is the
+case throughout the entire summer and generally the case in winter also)
+the patient has the advantages of indoor comfort plus an outdoor
+atmosphere. At the end of the ward a covered verandah is spacious enough
+to take an extra couple of beds for those requiring completely open-air
+treatment.
+
+The ward proper has certain additions: a kitchen with gas-stove and
+geyser; a sink-room with geyser and cleansing apparatus of special
+pattern; a bathroom with geyser; lavatories; a small room for the
+isolation of a patient on the danger-list; a linen-room; and cupboards.
+All these are packed neatly under that one rectangular corrugated roof
+which looked so ugly and so unpromising from outside.
+
+Do not pity the wounded soldier because he is quartered in a "hut." The
+word sounds unattractive. But if it is the right kind of hut, he is in
+the soundest and most sanitary type of temporary hospital that the mind
+of man has yet devised. The rain-drops may rattle a shade noisily on the
+roof, the asbestos lining may be devoid of ornamentation, but as he
+lies in bed and contemplates that unadorned ceiling he is a deal better
+off than if he were gazing at the elaborate (and dust-harbouring)
+cornices of the So-and-So Club's grandiose smoking-lounge in Pall Mall.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+FROM THE "D" BLOCK WARDS
+
+
+If you walk up the corridor at half-past four on certain afternoons of
+the week you will meet a mob of patients trooping from their wards to
+the concert-room. Being built of wood and corrugated iron, the corridor
+is an echoing cave of noises. It echoes the tramp of feet--and
+army-pattern boots were not soled for silence. It echoes the thud-thud
+of crutches. It echoes the slurred rumble of wheeled chairs and
+stretcher-trollies. But, above all, at half-past four on concert days it
+echoes happy talk and chaff and boisterous laughter.
+
+As often as not, the loudest talk, the cheeriest chaff, the most
+spontaneous laughter, emanate from the blue-clad stalwarts who have
+mustered from the "D" Block wards.
+
+"D" Block contains the wards for eye-wound cases.
+
+Here they come, a string of them, mostly with bandages round their
+heads. The leading man owns one good eye--a twinkling eye--an eye of
+mischief--an eye (you would guess at once) for the girls. (But the eye's
+owner probably calls them the "pushers." Such is our language now.)
+Behind him, in single file, and in step with him, march a gang of
+patients each with his hand on the shoulder of the man in front. Tramp,
+tramp! Their tread is purposely thunderous on the bare boards of the
+corridor. They sing as they advance. It is a ragtime chorus whose most
+memorable line runs, "You never seem to kiss me in the same place
+twice." A jaunty lilt, to be sure, both in tune and in rhythm. Tramp,
+tramp! The one-eyed leader swerves round a corner, roaring the refrain.
+His followers swerve too. Suddenly the Matron is encountered, emerging
+from her room. "Fine afternoon, Matron!" The leader interrupts his chant
+to utter this hearty greeting. And, with one voice, "Fine afternoon,
+Matron!" exclaim his followers. But they do not turn their heads. Each
+with his hand resting on the shoulder of the man in front they go
+steadily on, towards the concert-room, with an odd intentness, glancing
+neither to one side nor the other. For though, at their leader's cue,
+they have hailed the Matron, they have not seen her. They are blind.
+
+The spectacle of men--particularly young men--who have given their sight
+for their country is, to most observers, a moving one. Melancholy are
+the reflections of the visitor who meets, for the first time, a
+promenading party of our blind patients. It is the plain truth,
+nevertheless, that the blind men themselves are far from melancholy. One
+of the rowdiest characters we ever had in the hospital was totally
+blind. The blind men's wards are notoriously amongst the least sedate. I
+offer no explanation. I simply state the fact. I will fortify it by an
+anecdote.
+
+It came to pass that eight complimentary tickets for a Queen's Hall
+matinée were received by the Matron, who in due course allotted them to
+seven "D" Block patients. An orderly, detailed to take them to the
+hall, completed the octette. Corporal Smith, the orderly in question,
+recounted his adventures afterwards. "Never again," quoth he, "shall I
+jump at a matinée job if there are blind chaps in the party. They're the
+deuce."
+
+You must understand that we hospital orderlies regard the task of
+shepherding patients to an entertainment in town as an agreeable form of
+holiday. I have had some very pleasant outings of that sort myself. But
+not--I am thankful to recall, in the light of Corporal Smith's
+narrative--with blind men. One-legged men are often a sufficient care,
+in manoeuvring on and off omnibuses. Apparently helpless cripples have
+a marvellous gift for losing themselves, entering wrong trains, and
+generally escaping--as the hour for return draws nigh--from one's
+custody. And the city seems to be full of lunatics ready to supply
+alcohol or indigestible refreshments to the most delicate war-hospital
+inmates. Even with ordinary patients the orderly's afternoon excursion
+is sometimes not unfraught with anxiety. But blind patients, as Corporal
+Smith said, are the deuce.
+
+Out of his party, four were totally blind, two could recognise dimly
+the difference between light and darkness, and one had a single good
+eye.
+
+Queen's Hall was reached, by bus, without mishap. After the performance
+there was tea at an A.B.C. shop. Here Jock, one of the totally blind
+men, a Scotchman--all Scots are "Jocks" in the army--distinguished
+himself by facetiæ (audible throughout the whole shop) on the English
+pronunciation of the word 'scone,' and intimated his desire to treat the
+company to a ballad. This project was suppressed, but "a silly fool in a
+top hat threatened to report me for having given my men drink," said
+Corporal Smith. "Jock gave _him_ the bird, not 'arf. But I thought it
+about time to be going home."
+
+So the party prepared to go home.
+
+The bus was voted dull. Somebody suggested the tube. Corporal Smith
+consented.
+
+He had forgotten that at Oxford Circus station the lifts have been
+abolished in favour of sliding staircases. Confronted by the escalator,
+Corporal Smith halted his party and informed them that they must walk
+down by the ordinary stair. The escalator was not safe for blind men.
+Unfortunately, Jock had sniffed a lark; the one-eyed man backed him up;
+the party--elated perhaps by their tea--would not hear of anything so
+humdrum as a descent by the ordinary stair. They were going on the
+sliding stair. They insisted. Corporal Smith argued in vain. In vain he
+exerted his (purely nominal) authority. His charges mocked him. The
+one-eyed man leading, with Jock in his wake, they launched themselves at
+the sliding stair. In sheer desperation Corporal Smith brought up the
+rear, supporting two of the more timid venturers as best he might. None
+of the group except Corporal Smith himself, as it turned out, had ever
+travelled on an escalator before. But they had heard a comic song about
+a sliding stair, and they wished--Jock especially--to sample this
+metropolitan invention.
+
+By dodging forward to place each blind man's hand upon the banister,
+Corporal Smith managed to send off his patients without a stumble. But
+as the stair inexorably lowered them into the bowels of the earth he
+realised, only too vividly, what might happen at the foot of the
+descent. The evening rush of suburb-bound passengers had begun and the
+staircase was rather crowded. Nobody seemed to realise that the
+khaki-overcoated men who stood so still upon the steps were not the
+usual hospital convalescents out on leave and able to look after
+themselves. Corporal Smith, delayed by one man who had hesitated at the
+top before taking the plunge, beheld his charges below him, hopelessly
+dotted, at intervals, amongst the general public. It was impossible for
+him to struggle down ahead, to the bottom of the staircase, to guide the
+men off as they arrived. This task, he hoped, would be adequately
+performed by the one-eyed man.
+
+It might have been. The one-eyed man was game for anything. But Jock,
+arriving in the highest good humour at the bottom of the staircase, was
+tilted sideways by the curve, and promptly sat down on the
+landing-place. Instead of rising, he proclaimed aloud that this was
+funnier even than England's pronunciation of the word 'scone.'
+Whereupon various hurrying passengers, including an old lady, tripped
+over his prone form. The sensation of being kicked and sat upon appealed
+to Jock's sense of humour. The more people avalanched across him the
+more comic he thought it. And in a moment there was quite a pile of
+wriggling bodies on top of him. For though the public managed on the
+whole to leap over, or circumvent, the obstacle presented by Jock's
+extremely large body, none of his blind comrades did so.
+
+"Every single one of them fell flop," said Corporal Smith; "I give you
+my word."
+
+But were they downhearted? No! They regarded this mysterious hurly-burly
+of arms and legs as a capital jest. So far from being alarmed or
+annoyed, they shouted with glee. The old lady, who had gathered herself
+together and was directing a stream of voluble reproof at Corporal Smith
+for his "callousness and cruelty to these unhappy blind heroes," retired
+discomfited. Jock's comments routed her more effectively than the
+Corporal's assurance that the episode was none of his choosing.
+
+The party at last sorted itself out and was placed upon its feet once
+more. It was excessively pleased with its exploit. Hilarity reigned.
+Corporal Smith, relieved, made ready to conduct his squad to the
+platform.
+
+Alas, a bright idea occurred to Jock. Why not go up the other sliding
+stair and down again?
+
+Agreed, _nem. con._ At least, Corporal Smith's _con._ was too futile to
+be worth counting.
+
+"I had to go with the blighters," said he. "There was no end of a crowd
+by this time. And Jock and some of the others fell over at the top
+again. And there was a row with the ticket-collector. And people kept
+saying they'd report me. _Me!_ And when I'd got my party down to the
+bottom for the second time, and some of the tube officials had come and
+said they couldn't allow it and we must buzz off home, I lined the
+fellows up to march 'em to the train, and dash me if two weren't
+missing. They'd given me the slip."
+
+The two truants, it may be added, could not be found. Corporal Smith
+had to return without them. At a late hour of the evening they appeared,
+not an atom repentant, at the hospital, having persuaded someone to put
+them into the correct bus. One of them, Jock, explained that, being from
+the North, he had desired to seize this opportunity of seeing the sights
+of London. Jock, I may remind you, is totally blind. Jock's guide, the
+man who had volunteered to show him the sights and who had only once
+been in London before, could see very faintly the difference between
+light and dark.... Thus this pair of irresponsibles had fared forth into
+the dusk of Regent Street.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It sounds a very horrible fate to be blinded. But somehow the blind men
+themselves seldom seem to be overwhelmed by its horribleness. If you
+want to hear the merriest banter in a war hospital, visit the blind
+men's wards. The pathos of them lies less in the sadness of the victims
+than in the triumphant, wonderful fact that they are _not_ sad. I wish
+we others all inhabited the same mysteriously jocund spiritual realm as
+Jock and his comrades, who come tramp-tramping to the concert-room down
+the corridor from the D wards.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+WHEN THE WOUNDED ARRIVE
+
+
+The receiving hall of the hospital is its clearing house of patients. It
+is a huge room, with a lofty and echoing roof, a little in the style of
+a church. Before the war, when the building was a school, this rather
+grandiose apartment no doubt witnessed speechifyings and prize
+distributions. May the time be not far distant when it will once again
+be used for those observances! Meanwhile its vast floor is occupied by
+ranks of beds.
+
+Those beds are generally untenanted. Visitors who, like the lady in the
+play, have taken the wrong turning, are apt to find themselves in the
+receiving hall, and, gazing at its array of vacant beds, have been known
+to conclude that the hospital was empty. (As if any war-hospital, in
+these times, could be empty!) But our patients have only a short
+acquaintanceship with the receiving-hall beds: these beds are momentary
+resting-places on their journey healthwards: they are not meant to lie
+in but to lie _on_. The three-score wards for which the receiving hall
+is the clearing house are the real destination of the patients; down
+long corridors, in wards far cosier because less ornate than this, the
+patient will find "his" bed ready for him, the bed which he is not to
+lie on but _in_.
+
+We orderlies meet each convoy at the front door of the hospital. The
+walking-cases are the first to arrive--men who are either not ill
+enough, or not badly enough wounded, to need to be put on stretchers in
+ambulances. They come from the station in motor-cars supplied by that
+indefatigable body, the London Ambulance Column. The walking-case
+alights from his car, is conducted into the receiving hall, and ten
+minutes later is in the bathroom. For the ritual of the bath must on no
+account be omitted--although now not so obviously imperative as in the
+early period of the war. Few patients reach us who have not first
+sojourned, either for a day or two or for weeks, in hospitals in France.
+They are therefore merely travel-stained, as you or I might be
+travel-stained after coming over from Dublin to Euston. The bath is thus
+a pleasure more than a necessity. Whereas there _was_ an era, when our
+guests came straight from only too populous trenches....
+
+"O.C. Baths," as the bathroom orderly was nicknamed, had to be
+circumspect in the performance of his job.
+
+The few minutes which the walking-case spends in the receiving hall are
+occupied (1) in drinking a cup of cocoa, and (2) in "having his
+particulars taken."
+
+Poor soul!--he is weary of giving his "particulars." He has had to give
+them half-a-dozen times at least, perhaps more, since he left the front.
+At the field dressing-station they wanted his particulars, at the
+clearing-station, on the train, at the base hospital, on another train,
+on the steamer, on the next train, and now in this English hospital. As
+he sits and comforts himself with cocoa, a "V.A.D." hovers at his
+elbow, intent on a printed sheet, the details of which she is rapidly
+filling-in with a pencil. For this is a card-index war, a colossal
+business of files and classifications and ledgers and statistics and
+registrations, an undertaking on a scale beside which Harrod's and
+Whiteley's and Selfridge's and Wanamaker's and the Magazin du Louvre,
+all rolled into one, would be a fleabite of simplicity. Ere the morrow
+shall have dawned, our patient's military biography will be recounted,
+by various clerks, in I don't know how many different entries. If you
+are curious, refer to one of our volumes of the _Admission and Discharge
+Book: Field Service Army Book 27a_. Open it at any of its
+closely-written pages and see the host of ruled columns which the
+orderly in charge of it must inscroll with reference to each of the many
+thousands of patients who pass through our hospital per annum. The
+columns ask for his Regiment; Squadron, Battery or Company; Number;
+Rank; Surname; Christian Name; Age; Length of Service; Completed Months
+with Field Force; Diseases (wounds and injuries are expressed by a
+number indicating their nature and whereabouts); Date of Admission; Date
+of Discharge or Transfer; Number of Days under Treatment; Number of
+Ward; Religion; and "Observations"--a space usually occupied by the name
+of the hospital ship upon which our friend crossed the Channel, and the
+name of the convalescent home to which he went on bidding us adieu.
+
+Having furnished the preliminary statements which lay the foundation of
+this compendious memoir, the walking-case thankfully finishes his cocoa,
+picks up the package of "blues" which has been put at his side, and
+departs, with his fellows, to the bathroom. Here he is tackled by the
+Pack Store orderlies, who take from him, and enter in their books, his
+khaki clothes. These he must leave in exchange for the blue slop uniform
+which, _pro tem._, is to be his only wear. When he emerges from the
+bathroom he is attired in what is now England's most honourable
+livery--the royal blue of the war-hospital patient. And (though perhaps
+the matter is not mentioned to him in so many words) his own suit is
+already ticketed with an identification label and on its way to the
+fumigator. This is no reflection on the owner of the suit ... but there
+are some things we don't talk about. Mr. Fumigator-Wallah is not the
+least busy of the more retiring members of a war-hospital staff. He is
+not in the limelight; but you might come to be very sad and sorry if he
+took it into his head to neglect his unapplauded part off-stage.
+
+The walking-cases are still splashing and dressing in the bathroom when
+the ambulances with the cot-cases begin to appear. Now is the orderlies'
+busy time. Each stretcher must be quickly but gently removed from the
+ambulance and carried into the receiving hall.
+
+Four orderlies haul the stretcher from its shelf in the ambulance; two
+orderlies then take its handles and carry it indoors. At the entrance to
+the receiving hall they halt. The Medical Officer bends over the
+patient, glances at the label which is attached to him, and assigns him
+to a ward. (Certain types of cases go to certain groups of wards.) The
+attendant sergeant promptly picks a metal ticket from a rack and lays
+it on the stretcher. The ticket has, punched on it, the number of the
+patient's ward and the number of the patient's bed in that ward. This
+ceremony completed, the orderlies proceed, with their burden, up the
+aisle between the beds in the receiving hall.
+
+Arrived at the bed, they lower their stretcher until it is at such a
+level that the patient, if he is active enough, can move off it on to
+the bed; if he is too weak to help himself he is lifted on to the bed by
+orderlies under the direction of the receiving-hall Sister. The
+stretcher is promptly removed and restored to its ambulance. If the
+patient is in an exceptionally suffering condition he is not placed on
+the receiving-hall bed; instead--the Medical Officer having given his
+permission--his stretcher is put on a wheeled trolley and he is taken
+straight away to his ward, so that he will only undergo one shift of
+position between the ambulance and his destination. The majority of
+stretcher-cases, however, reach us in a by no means desperate state,
+for, as I say, they seldom come to England without having been treated
+previously at a base abroad (except during the periods of heavy
+fighting). And it is remarkable how often the patient refuses help in
+getting off the stretcher on to the bed. He may be a cocoon of bandages,
+but he will courageously heave himself overboard, from stretcher to bed,
+with a gay _wallop_ which would be deemed rash even in a person in
+perfect health. Our receiving hall, at a big intake of wounded, when
+every bed bears its poor victim of the war, presents a spectacle which
+might give the philosopher food for thought; but I suspect that, if he
+regarded its actualities rather than his own preconceptions, what would
+impress him more than the sadness would be on the one hand the
+kindliness, brisk but not officious, of the staff, and on the other the
+spontaneous geniality of the battered occupants of the beds. The
+orderlies can spare little time for talk, but the few chats which they
+are able to have with patients whom they are helping to change their
+clothes, or to whom they are proffering the inevitable cocoa (which is
+a cocktail, as it were, prior to the meal which will be served in the
+men's own ward), are punctuated by jokes and laughter rather than the
+long-visaged "sympathy" which the outsider might--quite wrongly!--have
+pictured as appropriate to such an assemblage.
+
+The stretcher-case, before he is taken to his ward, must also "give his
+particulars," must also be interviewed by the Pack Store officials, and
+must also have assigned to him his blue uniform (wherewith are a shirt,
+a cravat, slippers and socks) in anticipation of the time when he shall
+be able to use his feet again and promenade our corridors and grounds.
+He receives the customary packet of cigarettes (probably the second, for
+he often gets one at the railway station too), and then, on another
+stretcher, mounted on a trolley, is wheeled off to his ward. Here,
+bestowed in bed at last, we leave him to his blanket-bath, his meal, his
+temperature-taking and chart filling-in by the Sister, his visit from
+the doctor, and all the rest of it. For the moment we see no more of
+him; we must race back to the receiving hall, and, if there are no more
+patients to take away, return the trolley to its proper nook, put
+straight the blankets and pillows on the beds, sweep the floor, and tidy
+up generally, in readiness for the next convoy's advent.
+
+Presently the huge room, beneath its dim arched ceiling, is silent and
+empty once more. The four ranks of beds, without a crease on their brown
+blankets, are bare of occupants. The Sister and her probationers have
+vanished. The Pack Store orderlies have carried off their loot of dirty
+khaki tunics and trousers for the fumigator. The clerical V.A.D.'s have
+gone to enter "particulars" in ledgers and card-indices. The cookhouse
+people have removed their cocoa urn. The sergeant is inspecting the
+metal ward-tickets left in his rack. A glance at them tells him how many
+beds, and which beds, are free in the hospital; for the tickets have no
+duplicates; any given ticket can only reappear in the rack when the bed
+which it connotes is out of use and awaiting a newcomer; the ticket
+hangs from a nail in the wall beside the patient's bed just so long as
+that bed is tenanted. So the rack of metal tickets might almost take the
+place of that important document, of which a freshly-compiled edition is
+typed every morning, the Empty Bed List; and the sergeant is meditative
+as he sorts into the rack the tickets which have newly been sent in from
+the Sisters of wards where there have been departures. "Not much room in
+the eye-wound wards," he ponders; or, "A lot of empties in the
+medicals." And then ... the tinkle of the telephone....
+
+"Another convoy expected at 6.15? Twenty walking-cases and seventeen
+cots. Right you are!"
+
+And at 6.15 the party of orderlies will be back again at the front door,
+again the motor-cars will stream up the drive, again the ambulances will
+come with their stretchers, and again the receiving hall will awaken
+from its interlude of silence to echo with the activities incidental to
+a clearing house of those damaged human bundles which are the _raison
+d'être_ of our great war-hospital.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+"T.... A...."
+
+
+War-hospital patients are of many sorts. It is a common mistake of the
+arm-chair newspaper devourer to lump all soldiers together as quaint,
+bibulous, aitch-dropping innocents, lamblike and gauche in
+drawing-rooms, fierce and picturesque on the field, who (to judge by
+their published photographs) are continually on the grin and continually
+shaking hands either with each other or with equally grinsome French
+peasant women at cottage doors or with the local mayor who congratulates
+them on the glorious V.C.'s which, of course, they are continually
+winning. In a war hospital that harbours many thousands of patients per
+annum, we should know, in the long run, something about the
+characteristics of Tommy Atkins; and it is with resentment that I hear
+him thus classified as a mere type. He is not a type. Discipline and
+training have given him some veneer of generalised similarities. Beneath
+these, Tommy Atkins is simply the man in the street--any man in any
+street; and if you look out of your window in the city and see a throng
+of pedestrians upon the pavement you might just as well say that because
+they are all civilians they are all alike as that, because all soldiers
+wear khaki, they are all alike.
+
+I have a quarrel with the Press on the score of its persistent fostering
+of this notion that "our gallant lads" (as the sentimental scribe calls
+them) are a pack of children about whose exploits an unfailing stream of
+semi-pathetic, semi-humorous anecdotes must be put forth. Even the old
+professional army exhibited no dead level either of blackguards on the
+one hand or humble Galahads on the other. But whatever may have been the
+case before the war, all the armies of Europe are now alike in this,
+that they are composed of civilians who merely happen to have adopted a
+certain garb for the performance of a certain job--and, be it remarked,
+a temporary job. That garb has not reduced the citizens, who have the
+honour to wear it, to a monotonous level either of intelligence or of
+conduct: nor even of opinions about the war itself. I have had
+fire-eaters in my ward who breathed the sentiments of _John Bull_ and
+the _Evening News_, and I have had pacifists (they seemed to have fought
+no less bravely) who, week by week, read and approved Mr. Snowden in the
+_Labour Leader_; I have had Radicals and Tories, and patients who cared
+for neither party, but whose passion was cage-birds or boxing or amateur
+photography; I have had patients who were sulky and patients who were
+bright, patients who were unlettered and patients who were educated,
+patients who could hardly express themselves without the use of an
+ensanguined vocabulary and patients who were gently spoken and
+fastidious. Each of them was Tommy Atkins--the inanely smirking hero of
+the picture-paper and the funny paragraph. Neither his picture nor the
+paragraph may be positively a lie, and yet, when the arm-chair dweller
+chucklingly draws attention to them, I am tempted to relapse into
+irreverence and utter one or other (or perhaps both) of two phrases
+which T. Atkins is himself credited with using _ad nauseam_--"Na-poo"
+and "I _don't_ think."
+
+When I assert--as I do unhesitatingly assert--that no one could work in
+a war-hospital ward for any length of time without an ever-deepening
+respect and fondness for Tommy Atkins, it is the same thing as asserting
+that the respect and fondness are evoked by close contact with one's
+countrymen: nothing more nor less. A hospital ward is a haphazard
+selection of one's fellow-Britons: the most wildly haphazard it is
+possible to conceive. And the pessimistic cynic who, after a sojourn in
+that changing company for a month or two can still either generalise
+about them or (if he does) can still not acknowledge that in the mass
+they are amazingly lovable, is beyond hope. The war has taught its
+lessons to us all, and none more important than this. For myself I
+confess that I never knew before how nice were nine out of ten of the
+individuals with whom I sat silent in trains, whom I glanced at in
+business offices or behind counters, whom I saw in workshops or in the
+field or who were my neighbours in music-halls. They were strangers. In
+the years to come I hope they will be strangers no longer. For they and
+I have dressed alike and borne the same surname--Atkins.
+
+Of course, there remain a few generalisations which _can_ safely be
+risked about even so nondescript a person as the new Tommy Atkins. As
+practically all the Tommy Atkinses are, at this moment, concentrated on
+the prosecution of one great job, it is natural that their main
+interests should revolve round that job. They all (for instance) want
+the job to be finished. They all (within my experience) want it to be
+finished well. They nearly all desire earnestly to cease soldiering as
+soon as the job _is_ finished well. I never yet met the man (though he
+may exist, outside the brains of the scribes aforementioned) who, having
+tasted the joys of roughing it, is determined not to return to a humdrum
+desk in an office: on the contrary, that office and that humdrum desk
+have now become this travelled adventurer's most roseate dream. I have
+conversed with patients drawn from nearly every walk in life, and I do
+not remember one who definitely spoke of refusing to go back to his
+former work--if he could get it.
+
+One of my patients had been a subterranean lavatory attendant. You would
+have thought his ambitions--after visits to Egypt, Malta, the
+Dardanelles and France--might have soared to loftier altitudes. He had
+survived hair-raising adventures; he had taken part in the making of
+history; although wounded he had not been incapacitated for an active
+career in the future; and he was neither illiterate nor unintelligent.
+Yet he told me, with obvious satisfaction, that his place was being kept
+open for him. I was, as it were, invited to rejoice with him over the
+destiny which was his. I may add that the singular revelations which he
+imparted as to the opportunities for extra earnings in his troglodyte
+trade extorted from me a more enthusiastic sympathy than might be
+supposed possible.
+
+That agreeable domestic pet, _homo sapiens_, remains unchanged even when
+you dress him up in a uniform and set him fighting. He is always
+consistently inconsistent; he is always both reasonable and
+unreasonable. You can try to cast him in a mould, but he resumes his
+normal shapelessness the moment the mould is removed. Expose him to
+frightful ordeals of terror and pain, and he will emerge grumbling about
+some petty grievance or carrying on a flirtation with another man's wife
+or squabbling about sectarian dogmas or gambling on magazine
+competitions or planning new businesses--in fact, behaving precisely as
+the natural lord of creation always does behave. No member of our
+hospital staff, I imagine, will ever forget the arrival of the first
+batch of exchanged British wounded prisoners; It was the most tragic
+scene I have ever witnessed. It is a fact, for which I make no apology,
+that tears were shed by some of those whose task it was to welcome that
+pitiful band of martyrs. We had received convoys of wounded many a time,
+but _these_ broken creatures, so pale, so neglected, so thin and so
+infinitely happy to be free once more, had a poignant appeal which must
+have melted the most rigid official. (And we are neither very official,
+here, nor very rigid.) Well, amongst these liberated captives was one
+who told a sad tale of starvation at his internment camp. There is
+little doubt that it was a true tale, in the main. On that I make no
+comment. I simply introduce you to this gentleman, who had been restored
+to his native land after ten months of entombment, in order to mention
+that on the following morning, when his breakfast was placed before him,
+he turned up his nose at it. Loudly complaining of the poorness of the
+food, he leant out of bed, picked up a brown-paper parcel which had been
+his only luggage, and produced from it some German salted herring, which
+he proceeded to eat with grumbling gusto.
+
+That is not specially Tommy Atkins; it is _homo sapiens_ of the
+hearthside, whether in suburban villa or in slum, for ever dissatisfied
+(more especially with his victuals) and for ever evoking our affection
+all the same.
+
+No; Tommy Atkins is never twice alike. He is unanimous on few debatable
+matters. One of them, as I have said, is the desirability of finishing
+the war--in the proper way. (But even here there are differences as to
+what constitutes the proper way.) Another is (I trust I shall not shock
+the reader) the extreme displeasingness of life at the front. I would
+not say that our hospital patients are positively thankful to be
+wounded, nor that they do not wish to recover with reasonable rapidity.
+But that they are glad to be safe in England once more is undeniable.
+The more honour to them that few, if any, flinch from returning to
+duty--when they know only too well what that duty consists of. But they
+make no bones about their opinion. Not long ago I was the conductor of a
+party of convalescents who went to a special matinée of a military
+drama. The theatre was entirely filled with wounded soldiers from
+hospitals, plus a few nurses and orderlies. It was an inspiring sight.
+The drama went well, and its patriotic touches received their due meed
+of applause. But when the heroine, in a moving passage, declared that
+she had never met a wounded British soldier who was not eager to get
+back to the front, there arose, in an instant, a spontaneous shout of
+laughter from the whole audience. That was Tommy Atkins unanimous for
+once.
+
+He was unanimous too, I should add, in perceiving immediately that the
+actress had been disconcerted by his roar of amusement. The poor girl's
+emotional speech had been ruined. She looked blank and stood irresolute.
+At once a burst of hand-clapping took the place of the laughter. It was
+not ironical, it was friendly and apologetic. "Go ahead!" it said.
+"We're sorry. Those lines aren't your fault, anyway. You spoke them very
+prettily, and it was a shame to laugh. But the ass of a playwright
+hadn't been in the trenches, and if your usual audiences relish that
+kind of speech they haven't been there either."
+
+So much for Tommy Atkins in his unanimous mood--unanimously condemning
+cant and at the same time unanimously courteous. Now that I come to
+reflect I believe that, in his best moments, these are perhaps the only
+two points concerning which Tommy Atkins _is_ unanimous. Whether he
+lives up to them or not (and to expect him unflinchingly to live up to
+them in season and out of season is about as sensible as to expect him
+perpetually to live up to the photographs and anecdotes), we may take
+them as his ideal. He dislikes humbug: he tries to be polite. Could one
+sketch a sounder scaffolding on which to build all the odd
+divergencies--crankinesses and heroisms, stupidities and
+engagingnesses--which may go to make the edifice of an average decent
+soul's material, mental and spiritual habitation?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Postscript._--An expert--one of England's greatest experts--who has
+read the above tells me that I have not done justice to the old
+professional army men of Mons and the Aisne. When wounded and in our
+hospital they _did_ want to go back to fight. But their sole reason,
+given with frankness, was that they considered they were needed: the new
+army, in training, was not ready: it would be murder to send the new
+army out, unprepared, to such an ordeal.
+
+This authority, who has interviewed many thousands of convalescents,
+further remarked: "The wounded man who has been under shell fire and who
+professes to be eager to go back, whether ordered or no, is a liar. On
+the other hand, the scrim-shankers who try to get out of going back,
+when they should go back, are an amazingly small minority."
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+LAUNDRY PROBLEMS
+
+
+A number of oddly unmasculine duties fell to the lot of the R.A.M.C.
+orderly prior to the time when "V.A.D.'s" were allowed to take his place
+(at least to some extent) throughout our English war-hospitals. One of
+my first tasks in the morning was the collecting and classification of
+my ward's dirty linen. The work cannot be called difficult. It would be
+an exaggeration to say that it demands a supreme intellectual effort.
+But to the male mind it is, at least, rather novel. The average bachelor
+has perhaps been accustomed to scrutinise his collars, handkerchiefs and
+underclothes before and after their trips to the laundry. He has seldom,
+I think, had intimate trafficking with pillow-cases, sheets,
+counterpanes and tablecloths. In the reckoning of these he is apt to
+make mistakes and to lapse into a casualness which, in a woman familiar
+with household routine, would be improbable. "Sister's" sharpest
+reproofs were called forth by errors made in connection with this daily
+exchange of clean for dirty linen.
+
+A form, of course, had to be filled in. (The army provides a form
+for everything.) This form presents a catalogue of eighty-one
+separate items, from "Blankets" ("Child's," "Infant's"--I do not
+know what is the difference between them, and I never had to deal with
+either--"G.S."--whatever that may be--and "White") to "Waist-coats,
+Strait." It distinguishes between ten kinds of "Cases"--pillow-cases,
+paillasse-cases, and the like: for example, there are "barrack"
+bolster-cases and "hospital" bolster-cases; and you must not confound
+"hospital" mattress-cases with "officers'" mattress-cases. You are
+misled if you imagine that the heading "Cases" has exhausted the
+possibilities which appeared to be latent in that noun; for, in addition
+to the ten unqualified "Cases" there are seven more, defined as "Cases,
+slip." Can you wonder that the orderly, presented with a bin-full of
+confused and crumpled objects ready for the wash, and told to count them
+and enter their numbers in the appointed columns, occasionally made a
+wrong guess? Then there were eight sorts of "Cloths"--tablecloth,
+tray-cloth, distinctive cloth, and so forth. (To how many lay minds does
+"distinctive cloth" convey any meaning?) Counterpanes you would think to
+be obvious enough; but that remarkable compilation, the _Check Book for
+Hospital Linen_ ("Printed for H.M. Stationery Office...." etc.),
+recognises four varieties. It also allows for four varieties of sheets,
+four of aprons and four of trousers. Of towels it knows six.
+
+Each ward has a certain stock of linen in its cupboard. That stock can
+only be kept at the proper level by strict barter of a soiled object for
+a clean duplicate of the same object. As there are three hundred and
+sixty-five days in the year on which this transaction occurs, and sixty
+wards' bundles of linen to be dealt with by both the Dirty Linen
+Department and the Clean Linen Department on each of those days, it is
+clear that exactitude in the filling-in of the form aforementioned
+becomes an affair of almost nightmare importance. Bring back from the
+Clean Linen Store three dusters instead of the four dusters which you
+previously handed in at the Dirty Linen Store, and your cupboard will,
+to the end of time, be short of one duster which it should have
+possessed. Even if Sister fails to pounce promptly on the evidence of
+the loss, the quartermaster's dread stocktaking will ultimately find you
+out. Your cupboard declines to correspond with his book-entries. And
+there is trouble brewing, in consequence. (But indeed, if the loss of a
+single duster were the sole crime revealed on stocktaking day, you would
+be fortunate.)
+
+The orderly, with an obese bundle of washing on his back, plods from the
+ward to the Dirty Linen Store at quarter to nine every morning. I say he
+"plods" because the bundle is generally too heavy for transportation at
+a rapid pace. Twenty sheets are usually but a part of the bundle; and
+twenty sheets are alone no light burden. Between his teeth--both his
+hands being occupied with the balancing of the bundle--he carries his
+chit: that indispensable list. Arrived at the store he dumps the bundle
+on the ground, opens it, and pitches its contents piecemeal over a
+counter to one of the staff of the store. One by one the objects are
+named and counted aloud, as they fly across the counter, the staff
+orderly simultaneously checking the list and keeping an eye on what he
+is receiving. For we may, by guile, palm off on him one sheet as two. It
+can be done, by means of a certain legerdemain which comes with
+practice. Or we may have received from the Dry Store, amongst the rags
+meant for cleaning purposes, a couple of quite worn-out socks, not a
+pair, and long past placing on human feet: these derelicts, with a rapid
+motion, can be passed over the counter amongst the good socks, and only
+later in the day will the Dirty Linen Store officials detect the
+fraud--when it is impossible to locate its perpetrator. The
+store-orderly's job is therefore one requiring some astuteness: his
+checking of the list has to be achieved at a high speed and in the midst
+of a babel; for as many ward-orderlies are present as the length of the
+counter will accommodate, and they are all getting rid of their
+dirty-linen bundles at the tops of their voices.
+
+Altercations, I am afraid, were not infrequent in the epoch when the
+actors in this drama were of the male sex. (Even now, when the scene is
+mainly feminine, I believe differences of opinion continue to arise, but
+doubtless the language in which they are conducted is seemlier if no
+less deadly.) The store-orderly had a marvellous eye for the difference
+between two kinds of shirts which are worn by our patients. One kind has
+a pleat in the back, the other kind hasn't; and I confess I occasionally
+transposed them, on the form. It was fatal to do so. There was a
+separate line for each brand of shirt and there must be a separate
+entry. The store-orderly's trained powers of observation could see that
+pleat, or the absence of it, even as the shirt slid across his line of
+vision in a torrent of other shirts. His hand shot out and grabbed it
+back from joining the heap on the floor within the counter. His pencil
+poised itself from the ticking-off of the items on the form. "Wrong
+again!" he would cry, sometimes in anguish and sometimes in anger. And
+there was nothing for it but to apologise. To keep on good terms with
+the various orderlies in the various stores was the secret of making
+one's life worth living--a secret even profounder than that of keeping
+on good terms with Sister: to be sure it was (though she seldom realised
+it) the very foundation of the art of keeping on good terms with her.
+You could not even begin to please Sister unless, at the end of those
+incessant journeyings of yours which she did not see, you had dealings
+with store-orderlies who were obliging and who would give you the things
+which the taskmistress had sent you to fetch (or would drop a kindly
+hint as to where and by what means you could acquire them). The Dirty
+Linen Store orderly who declined to accept your plea for forgiveness
+when you had been obtuse enough to see a fomentation-wringer in a
+teacloth, could devastate the harmony of a whole forenoon. A sweet
+reasonableness was undoubtedly the note to strike when such a
+contretemps occurred.
+
+Having got quit of the last item in your bundle, you returned to the
+ward to attend to other (and generally less entertaining) duties until
+such time as it was proper to repair to the Clean Linen Store. The staff
+of the Clean Linen Store, a huge department whose system of book-keeping
+is enough to make the brain reel (for here sheets, etc., are dealt with
+not in dozens but in thousands), had in the interim received your chit
+from their colleagues of the Dirty Linen Store. These latter, rashly or
+otherwise, had guaranteed its accuracy by initialing it. Accordingly, in
+the Clean Linen Store, a fresh bundle was ready for your acceptance, its
+contents consisting of duplicates of the objects now on their way to the
+laundry.
+
+It was unwise, however, to accept this neatly folded and virginal bundle
+without investigation. It might contain what the chit demanded; or it
+might not. Before you could carry it off you must yourself initial, and
+finally bid farewell to, the chit: thereby certifying that you had got
+what you claimed. To make sure of this you would be well advised to undo
+the bundle, and (as far as was practicable in a jostling crowd of
+fellow-orderlies similarly employed) run through the whole of its
+contents, computing them with precision: twenty sheets, twelve
+pillow-cases, nine bolster-cases--it is only too easy to miss the
+difference in the sizes of these--seventeen hand-towels, two
+operating-aprons, eleven handkerchiefs, ten pyjama trousers, ten
+sleeping-jackets, and so on. When you had ticked-off all these separate
+items in the list you scribbled your initials thereon and fled with your
+bundle--to find, as often as not, that Sister, sorting the things into
+her cupboard, could discover a mistake after all. This meant a humble
+return to the Clean Linen Store to beg for the mistake's rectification;
+and the sergeant in charge had merely to take your chit from his file,
+and show you your own initials on it, to prove that you were in the
+wrong.
+
+It is conceivable that by means of a ward stocktaking and a reference of
+the results to the figures in the sergeant's huge ledger, you might have
+proved that you were not in the wrong. But the only time I ever knew one
+of these disputes to be thus put to the test I admit I wished that I had
+refrained from so temerarious an adventure. Somehow or other I had
+managed to come back to the ward with three clean pillow-cases fewer
+than the tale of dirty ones I had taken away. And Sister was exceedingly
+cross. The particular Sister whose drudge I was at that period was
+rather apt to be cross; and this was one of her crossest days. She
+threatened to "report" me, and in fact did so. I was not--as she seemed
+to expect--shot at dawn. I merely underwent a formal reproof from a high
+authority who perhaps (but this is a surmise) knew Sister's
+idiosyncrasies even better than I did. There remained, nevertheless, the
+pressing problem of the three strayed pillow-cases. These Sister
+commanded me to obtain from the Clean Linen Store. But you cannot go to
+the Clean Linen Store and say "Please give me three pillow-cases." The
+Clean Linen Store either says "Why?" (a question which, under the
+circumstances, is flatly unanswerable), or else tells you, in language
+both firm and ornamental, that you have already had them: your initialed
+chit testifies the fact.
+
+At all events, after some parley, the Clean Linen Store sergeant (who
+was less of an ogre than he pretended) offered to strike a bargain with
+me. If I would count all the pillow-cases, in and out of use, in my
+ward, and bring him the total, he would compare the said total with the
+figures in his ledger. Those figures he would not divulge to me. But if
+the number I announced was three short of the number in his ledger, he
+would give me the three, and say no more about it.
+
+The bargain seemed a fair one. In Sister's absence I spent a precious
+half-hour of what should have been my "afternoon off" in counting all
+the pillow-cases I could find in the ward. A good-natured probationer,
+who sympathised with me in my difficulties (she too had suffered),
+counted them also. A convalescent patient interested himself in the
+problem: he also went the round of the beds, and investigated the
+cupboard, counting all the pillow-cases. We three each arrived at the
+same total. Armed with this total I marched back to the sergeant in the
+Clean Linen Store.
+
+He turned up his ledger and ran his finger down the page till he came
+to the entry of pillow-cases opposite to my ward. And then he laughed a
+laugh of fiendish glee.
+
+"Do you know," he said, "that instead of having three pillow-cases too
+few, you've seven too many!"
+
+Such are the traps set by the business man, the expert of ledgers, for
+the innocent amateur. We had actually got more pillow-cases than we were
+entitled to. All unwittingly, in my eagerness to placate Sister, I had
+published the mild chicanery in which she had indulged on behalf of her
+ward. The sergeant, growing grey in the solution of these abstruse
+mathematical and psychological mysteries, had suspected this Sister all
+along. He enlightened me. She had recently been transferred from another
+ward--and in her going had (against the rules) wafted with her a small
+selection of that ward's property.... And now there would be a surprise
+stocktaking in her new ward: the seven surplus pillow-cases--and perhaps
+other loot--would have to be explained. Sister, in short, was in for a
+_mauvais quart d'heure_.
+
+It was a suitable penalty for her crossness. It should have taught her
+the perils of crossness. With regret I add that she did not envisage the
+episode in that light. She was merely rather crosser than before. It was
+without any profound sorrow that I soon afterwards bade her farewell, on
+her departure to overseas spheres of activity. But she had at least
+afforded me a lesson in the importance of accuracy over my dirty and
+clean linen bundles. Never again would I risk the ordeal of a surprise
+stocktaking; never again would I risk a combat with a ledger-fortified
+sergeant; never again would I risk any attempt at the tortuous in my
+dealings with the classifications of the eighty-one items on the
+tear-off leaf of that dire volume, the _Check Book for Hospital Linen_.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+ON BUTTONS
+
+
+In one of his recent books Mr. H.G. Wells expresses a surprised
+annoyance at the spectacle of spurs. Vast numbers of military gentlemen
+(he observed at the front) go clanking about in spurs although they have
+never had--and never will have--occasion to bestride a horse. Spurs are
+a symbolic survival, a waste of steel and of labour in manufacture, a
+futile expenditure of energy to keep clean and to put on and take off.
+
+When I first enlisted I felt a similar irritation in regard to buttons.
+His buttons are a burden to the new recruit. Time takes the edge off his
+resentment. Time is a soother of sorrows, a healer of rancours, however
+legitimate. Nevertheless one's buttons remain for ever a nuisance. I do
+not complain that I should have to make my bed, polish my boots, keep
+my clothes neat. These are the obvious decencies of life. But the daily
+shining-up of metal buttons which need never have been made of metal at
+all, which tarnish in the damp and indeed lose their lustre in an hour
+in any weather, which, moreover, look much prettier dull than
+bright--this is enough to convert the most bloodthirsty recruit into
+obdurate pacifism.
+
+It is to be presumed that in the pipe-claying days of peace the hours
+were apt to hang heavy in barracks, and the furbishing of buttons was
+devised not alone for smartness' sake, but to occupy idle hands for
+which otherwise Satan might be finding some more mischievous employment.
+The theory--though it throws a lurid light on the unprofitableness of a
+soldier's profession when there is no war to justify his existence--is
+not devoid of sense. But why this custom, designed for that excellent
+mortal, the T. Atkins who walked out with nurse-maids, and was none too
+busy between-whiles, should be forced upon a totally different (if no
+less estimable) T. Atkins whose job hardly gives him a moment for
+meals--let alone for dalliance with the fair--I cannot pretend to
+fathom. It is arguable that the ornamental soldier is suited by glossy
+buttons and may properly lavish time and trouble thereupon. It is not
+arguable that glossy buttons are a valid feature of the garb of a
+humdrum and harassed hospital orderly.
+
+Many a time, footsore and aching with novel toil, I could have groaned
+when, instead of lying down to relax, I had to tackle the polishing of
+that idiotic panoply of buttons. My tunic had (it still has) five large
+buttons in front, four pocket-flap buttons, two shoulder buttons, and
+two shoulder numerals, "T.--R.A.M.C.--LONDON." My great-coat had (it
+still has) five large front buttons, two shoulder buttons and two
+shoulder numerals, three back belt buttons, two coat-tail buttons. My
+cap had (it still has) a badge and two small strap-buttons. All these
+must be kept brilliant. And, in addition, there was the intricate
+brasswork of one's belt.
+
+Are the wounded any better looked after because a tired orderly has
+spent some of his off-duty rest-hour in rubbing metal buttons which
+would have been every bit as buttonable had they been made of bone?
+
+Many were the debates, in our hut, over the button problem. The
+abolition of metal buttons being impracticable--the bold project of a
+petition to the King and Lord Kitchener was never proceeded with--two
+questions alone interested us: (1) which was the best polish, and (2)
+which was the quickest and easiest system of polishing. The shabby
+peddler-cum-boot-maker who had somehow established, at that period, a
+monopoly of the minor trade of our camp, vended a substance (in penny
+tins) called Soldier's Friend. This was a solidified plate-polish of a
+pink hue. Having--as per the instructions--"moistened" it, in other
+words, spat upon it, you worked up a modicum of the resulting pink mud
+with an old toothbrush, then applied same to each button. When you had
+rubbed a pink film on to the button you proceeded to rub it off again,
+and lo! the tarnish had departed like an evil dream and the metal
+glistened as if fresh from the mint. If you were very particular you
+finished the performance with chamois leather. Thereafter you lost the
+last precious five minutes before parade in efforts, with knife-blade or
+clothesbrush, to remove from your tunic the smears of pink paste which
+had failed to repose on the buttons and had stuck to the surrounding
+cloth instead. Luckily, Soldier's Friend dries and cakes and powders off
+fairly quickly. It is a lovable substance, in its simple behaviour, its
+lack of complications. I surmise that somebody has made a fortune out of
+manufacturing millions of those penny tins. There is at least one
+imitation of Soldier's Friend on the market, and, like most imitations,
+it is neither better nor worse than the original. Except for the name on
+the outside of the tin, the two commodities cannot be told apart. No
+doubt the imitator has likewise made a fortune. If so, both fortunes
+have been amassed from a foible to whose blatant uselessness and
+wastefulness even a Bond Street jeweller or a de-luxe hotel chef would
+be ashamed to give countenance.
+
+One member of the hut's company, more fastidious than his fellows,
+objected to expectorating on to his Soldier's Friend. Rather than do so
+he would tramp the fifty yards to our wash-place and obtain a couple of
+drops of water from the tap. (The same man thought nothing of keeping a
+half-consumed ham, some decaying fruit, and an opened pot of Bovril all
+wrapped in his spare clothes in his box under his bed. That is by the
+way. I am here concerned not with human nature, but with buttons.) Plain
+water, however, was voted less effective than the more popular liquid.
+The scientifically minded had a notion that human spittle contained some
+acid which Nature had evolved specially to assist the action of
+Soldier's Friend. I am bound to say that I was of the anti-plain-water
+party myself. For a space I became an adherent of the experimentalists
+who moistened their Soldier's Friend with methylated spirit, alleging
+that the ensuing polish was more permanent. I lapsed. My small bottle of
+methylated spirit came to an end, and on reflection I was not sure that
+its superiority over spittle had been proved. Nothing, in the English
+climate, can make the sheen of metal buttons endure, at the
+outside, more than one day. "Bluebell," "Silvo," and the other
+chemico-frictional preparations in favour of which I ultimately
+abandoned Soldier's Friend, are alike in this--that their virtue lies in
+frequent application, diligence and elbow-grease. They are, every one,
+excellent. Their inventors deserve our gratitude. But our gratitude to
+their inventors must be nothing compared with their inventors' gratitude
+to the person who decreed that the hard-pressed T. Atkins of the Great
+War should wear (at least in part) the same needless finery as the
+relatively otiose T. Atkins of Peace. May that despot, whoever he be,
+depart to a realm of bliss--I suppose it would be bliss to him--where he
+has to do hospital orderlies' chores in an attire completely composed of
+tarnishing buttons, every separate one of which must hourly be brought
+up to the parade standard of specklessness.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+A WORD ABOUT "SLACKERS IN KHAKI"
+
+
+When the ambulances containing a new batch of wounded begin to roll up
+to the entrance of the hospital they are received by a squad of
+orderlies. To a spectator who happened to pass at that moment it might
+appear that these orderlies had nothing else to do but lift stretchers
+out of ambulances and carry them indoors. The squad of orderlies have an
+air of always being ready on duty waiting to pounce out on any patient
+who may arrive at any hour of the day or night and promptly transfer him
+to his bed. I have known of a visitor, witnessing this incident, who
+commented on it in a manner which showed that he imagined he had seen
+our unit performing its sole function; he pictured us existing purely
+and simply for one end--the carrying of stretchers up the front steps
+into the building. He was kind enough to praise the rapidity with which
+the job was done--but he held it to be a job which hardly justified the
+enlistment of so considerable a company of able-bodied males. What,
+exactly, we did with ourselves during the long hours when ambulances
+were _not_ arriving, he failed to understand. I suppose he pictured us
+twiddling our thumbs in some kind of cosy club-room situated in the
+neighbourhood of the front door, from whence we could be summoned as
+soon as another convoy hove in sight.
+
+The truth of the matter is quite otherwise. Arrivals of wounded, even
+when they occur several times a day (I have known six hundred patients
+enter the hospital in forty-eight hours), are far from being our chief
+preoccupation. Admittedly they take precedence of other duties. The
+message, "Convoy coming! Every man wanted in the main hall!" is the
+signal for each member of the unit who is not engaged in certain
+exempted sections to drop his work, whatever it is, and proceed smartly
+to report to the sergeant-in-charge. The telephone has notified us of
+the hour at which the ambulances may be expected; the hospital's
+internal telephone system has passed on the tidings to the various
+officials concerned; and, five minutes before the patients are due, all
+the orderlies likely to be required must "down tools," so to speak, and
+line-up at the door. They come streaming from every corner of the
+hospital and of its grounds. Some have been working in wards, some have
+been pushing trollies in the corridors, some have been shovelling coke,
+some have been toiling in the cookhouse or stores, some have been
+shifting loads of bedding to the fumigator, some have been on "sanitary
+fatigue," some have been cleaning windows or whitewashing walls, some
+have been writing or typing documents, some have been spending their
+rest-hour in slumber or over a game of billiards. Whatever they were
+doing, they must stop doing it at the word of command.
+
+If the convoy be a large one, its advent may even mean, for the
+orderlies, the dread announcement, "All passes stopped." The luckless
+wight whose one afternoon-off in the week this happens to be, and who
+has probably arranged to tryst with a lady friend, finds, at the gate,
+that he is turned back by the sentry. In vain he displays his pass,
+properly signed, stamped and dated: the telephone has warned the sentry
+(or "R.M.P."--Regimental Military Policeman) that the passes have been
+countermanded. Until the convoy has been dealt with, the pass is so much
+waste paper, and the unfortunate orderly's inamorata will look for him
+and behold him not. How many painful misunderstandings this "All passes
+stopped" law has given rise to, one shudders to guess.
+
+But indeed no war-hospital orderly ever arranges any appointment without
+the proviso that he is liable to break it. The folk who imagine that the
+hospital orderly enjoys a "cushy job" (to use the appropriate
+vernacular) seldom make sufficient allowance for this painful aspect of
+it. The ordinary soldier in training in an English camp has his evenings
+free, and certain other free times, which are nearly as sure as the
+sun's rising. The hospital orderly is _never_--in theory at any
+rate--off duty. His free moments are regarded not as a right but as a
+favour: no freedom, at any time, can be guaranteed. He is liable to be
+called on in the middle of the night, or at the instant when he is going
+off duty, or when at a meal, or when resting, or when on the point of
+walking out in pursuance of the gentle art of courtship. And he must
+respond, instanter, or he will find that he has earned the C.B.--which
+in this instance means not Companion of the Bath, but Confined to
+Barracks, a punishment as hard to bear as the cruel "keeping in" of our
+school-days.
+
+Without presuming to compare either the importance or the onerousness of
+the hospital orderly's work with that of the soldier capable of going to
+the front to fight, I would here add that the critic who watches the
+stretcher-carrying and thinks it a pity that able-bodied males should be
+wasted on it, is doing the system (not to mention the men themselves) an
+injustice. For the men whom he sees are not, as a matter of fact,
+able-bodied, even though muscular enough to stand this short physical
+effort. Excitable old gentlemen who believe that they can decide at a
+glance whether a man is medically fit, and write to the Press about the
+"shirkers" they think they have detected, were of the opinion, long
+since, that the R.A.M.C. should be combed out. Certain journals made a
+great feature of this proposal. Whatever may be the case elsewhere, I
+can only say that as far as our unit was concerned it had already,
+months before the newspaper agitation, been combed out five times; and
+this in spite of the fact that, at the period when I enlisted, our
+Colonel declined to look at any recruit who was not either over age or
+had been rejected for active service. The unit was thus made up, even
+then, of elderly men and of "crocks." (This was before the start of the
+Derby Scheme and, of course, considerably before the introduction of
+Universal Service.) Perhaps it is allowable to point the moral against
+the "shirker"-discovering armchair patriots aforesaid: that no small
+proportion of our unit was composed of over-age recruits who, instead
+of informing the world at large that they wished they were younger,
+"And, by Gad, I envy the lads their chance to do _anything_ in the
+country's cause," did not rest until they had found an opening. In my
+own hut there were two recruits over sixty years of age. Elsewhere in
+the unit there were several over fifty. Our mess-room at meal times was,
+and still is, dotted with grey-haired heads, not of retired army men
+rejoined, but of men who, previous to the war, had lived comfortable
+civilian lives. At a later date, when the few fit men that our
+combings-out revealed had gone elsewhere, the unit was kept up to
+strength by the drafting-in either of C3 recruits or of soldiers who,
+having been at the front and been wounded, or invalided back, were
+marked for home duty only. So much for the "slackers in khaki" which one
+extra emphatic writer (himself not in khaki, although younger than
+several of the orderlies here) professed to discover in the R.A.M.C.
+Those "slackers" may be having an easier time of it than the heroes of
+France, Gallipoli, Salonika, Egypt and Mesopotamia. But they are not
+having so easy a time as some of their detractors.
+
+The hospital orderly is not (I think I may assert on his behalf) puffed
+up with foolish illusions as to his place in the scheme of things. It is
+a humble place, and he knows it. His work is almost comically
+unromantic, painfully unpicturesque. Moreover--let us be frank--much of
+it is uninteresting, after the first novelty has worn off. Work in the
+wards has its compensations: here there is the human element. But only a
+portion of a unit such as ours can be detailed for ward work: the rest
+are either hewers of wood and drawers of water or else have their noses
+to a grindstone of clerical monotonousness beside which the
+ledger-keeping of a bank employee is a heaven of blissful excitements.
+You will find few hospital orderlies who are not "fed up"; you will find
+none who do not long for the war's end. And I fancy you will find very,
+very few who would not go on active service if they could. On the
+occasions when we have had calls for overseas volunteers, the response
+has always exceeded the demand. The people who, looking at a party of
+hospital orderlies, remark--it sounds incredible, but there _are_ people
+who make the remark--"These fellows should be out at the front," may
+further be reminded that "these fellows" now have no say in the choice
+of their own whereabouts. Not a soldier in the land can decide where or
+how he shall serve. That small matter is not for him, but for the
+authorities. He may be thirsting for the gore of Brother Boche, and an
+inexorable fate condemns him to scrub the gore of Brother Briton off the
+tiles of the operating theatre. He may (but I never met one who did)
+elect to sit snugly on a stool at a desk filling-in army forms or
+conducting a card index; and lo, at a whisper from some unseen Nabob in
+the War Office, he finds himself hooked willy-nilly off his stool and
+dumped into the Rifle Brigade. This is what it means to be in khaki, and
+it is hardly the place of persons not in khaki to bandy sneers about the
+comfortableness of the Linseed Lancers whose initials, when not standing
+for Rob All My Comrades, can be interpreted to mean Run Away, Matron's
+Coming. The squad of orderlies unloading that procession of ambulances
+at the hospital door may not envy the wounded sufferers whom they
+transmit to their wards; but the observer is mistaken if he assumes that
+the orderlies have, by some questionable manoeuvre, dodged the fiery
+ordeal of which this string of slow-moving stretchers is the harvest.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+THE RECREATION ROOMS
+
+
+We rather pride ourselves, at the 3rd London, on the fame of our
+hospital not merely as a place in which the wounded get well, but as a
+place in which they also "have a good time." The two things, truth to
+tell, are interlinked--a truism which might seem to need no labouring,
+were it not for the evidence brought from more rigid and red-tape-ridden
+establishments. A couple of our most valued departments are the "Old
+Rec." and the "New Rec."--the old and new recreation rooms. The new
+recreation room, a spacious and well-built "hut," contains three
+billiard tables, a library, and current newspapers, British and
+Colonial. This room is the scene of whist-drives, billiard and pool
+tournaments, and other sociable ongoings. Sometimes there is an
+exhibition match on the best billiard table: the local champion of
+Wandsworth shows us his skill--and a very pretty touch he has: once the
+lady billiard champion of England came, and defeated the best opponent
+we could enlist against her--an event which provoked tremendous applause
+from a packed congregation of boys in blue.
+
+The old recreation room is fitted with a permanent stage for theatricals
+and concerts. It is also our "Movie Palace." (I think our hospital was
+the first to instal a cinematograph as a fixture.) During the morning
+the floor area is dotted with miniature billiard tables--which are never
+for a moment out of use. In the afternoon these are removed; some
+hundreds of chairs replace them; and at 4.30 we begin an
+entertainment--music, a play (we have had Shakespeare here), lantern
+slides, films, or what not. Those entertainments, which have continued
+unbrokenly since the hospital began to function in 1914, constitute the
+outstanding feature of the "good time" enjoyed by 3rd Londoners. The
+"Old Rec." and its crowded concerts will be a memory cherished by hosts
+of fighting men from the homeland and from overseas.
+
+In the original hospital plan--drawn up before the war--the Old Rec.
+(which is a part of the main school building) was marked down to be a
+ward of forty beds. Its structure, its internal geography, and the sheer
+impossibility of providing it with the essential sanitary conveniences,
+would make it unsuitable to be a ward of four beds, let alone of forty.
+On this account its allotment for recreation purposes would be
+excusable. But the Old Rec. and the New Rec. too, for that matter,
+justify their superficial waste of bed-space on other--and
+unanswerable--grounds. It is a mere matter of common sense to arrange
+some centre to which the patient can repair and employ his leisure when
+he is sufficiently well to potter about though not well enough to be
+discharged from hospital. Instead of idling in his ward and disturbing
+the patients who are still confined to bed--and who, often, are urgently
+in need of quietness--the convalescent departs to one or other of the
+recreation rooms, morning and afternoon, where he can make as much
+noise as he likes and where he can meet and fraternise with his comrades
+from every front. (What exchanging of stories those recreation rooms
+have witnessed!) On the one hand, then, the seriously ill patient is not
+annoyed by the rovings in the ward of the walking patients; and on the
+other the walking patients are not irked by the necessity for keeping
+quiet at a period when returning health stimulates them to a wholesome
+desire for fun. Both kinds of patients, thus, may legitimately be said
+to get better more quickly than they would have had a chance to do were
+it not for the recreation rooms. It is within the writer's knowledge
+that the medical staff of the hospital, on being consulted as to the
+"bed value" of the recreation rooms, unanimously agreed that their
+existence reduced the average sojourn of the hospital's inmates by a
+definite "per day" ratio: that ratio, so far from showing a bed-space
+waste, worked out at a per-annum gain of bed-space equivalent to a
+ward--if such a colossal ward could conceived!--of upwards of 300 beds.
+So much for a point which might not appear to be worth detailed
+explanation, but which has here been glanced at in order that critics
+(for, unbelievable though it sounds, there have been curmudgeons to
+growl of spoiling the wounded by too much pleasure) may be answered in
+advance. The recreation rooms are a paying investment both to the
+hospital and to the State. This is our trump card in any "spoiling the
+wounded" controversy--though I dare say that most of us would not, in
+any case, care twopence whether the concerts and films and billiards
+were an investment or an extravagance: nothing would stand in the way of
+our ambition to provide the now proverbial "good time" for all the
+guests of the 3rd London.
+
+Scores of concerts of an excellence which would have been noteworthy
+anywhere have been presented to our assemblages of wounded in the Old
+Rec. Singers, musicians, actors and actresses have come and given of
+their best. Miss Hullah's Music in War Time Committee (that delightful
+body), and Mr. Howard Williams's parties, are perhaps our greatest
+regular standbys. Certain sections of the public know Mr. Howard
+Williams's name as a famous one in other fields of activity: to
+thousands of soldiers it is honoured as that of the man who tirelessly
+organised scrumptious tea-parties, pierrot shows, exhibition boxing
+contests, nigger troupe entertainments--a list of jollifications,
+indoors in winter and in the open air in summer, infinite in variety and
+guaranteed never once to fall flat. A curious Empire reputation, this of
+Mr. Williams!
+
+Yesterday, for instance, a nigger troupe visited the hospital. To be
+exact, they were the Metropolitan Police Minstrels ("By Permission of
+Sir E.R. Henry, G.C.V.O., K.C.B., C.S.I., Commissioner"); but no member
+of the audience, I imagine, could picture those jocose blackamoors, with
+their tambourines and bones, as really being anything so serious as
+traffic-controlling constables. That their comic songs were accompanied
+by a faultless orchestra was understandable enough. One can believe in a
+police band. One is not surprised that the police band is a good band.
+To believe that the ebony-visaged person with the huge red
+indiarubber-flexible mouth who sings "Under the archway, Archibald," and
+follows this amorous ditty with a clog dance is--in his washed
+moments--the terror of burglars, requires unthinkable flights of
+imagination. As I gazed at this singular resurrection of Moore and
+Burgess and breathless childhood's afternoons at the St. James's
+Hall--the half circle of inanely alert faces the colour of fresh
+polished boots--the preposterous uniforms and expansive
+shirt-fronts--the "nigger" dialect which this strange convention demands
+but which cannot be said to resemble the speech of any African tribe yet
+discovered--I found that by no effort of faith or credulity could I
+pierce the disguise and perceive policemen.
+
+It is at least twenty years since I met a nigger minstrel in the flesh.
+Vague ghosts of bygone persons and of piquant anachronisms seemed to
+float approvingly in the air: the Prince Consort, bustles, the high
+bicycle, sherry, Moody and Sankey, the Crystal Palace, Labouchere, "Pigs
+in Clover," Lottie Collins, Evolution, Bimetallism: hosts of forgotten
+images, names and shibboleths came popping out from the brain's dusty
+pigeon-holes, magically released by the spectacle of the nigger troupe.
+
+Yes, I was indeed switched into the past by Mr. Bones, Massa Jawns'n and
+the rest. And yet the present might have seemed more emphatic and more
+poignant. One felt, rather than saw, an audience of several hundred
+persons in the dim rows of chairs. And laughing at the broad witticisms
+of the niggers, or enjoying their choruses and orchestral
+accompaniments, one forgot just what that half-glimpsed audience
+consisted of; what it meant, and how it came to be here assembled.
+
+Of course when the lights were turned up in the interval, one beheld the
+usual spectacle: stretchers, wheeled chairs, crutches, bandaged heads,
+arms in splints, blind men, men with one arm, men with one leg: rank on
+rank of war's flotsam and jetsam, British, Australians, New Zealanders,
+Newfoundlanders, Canadians, come to make merry over the minstrels: in
+the front row the Colonel and the Matron, with officer patients; here
+and there an orderly or a V.A.D.; here and there a Sister with her
+"boys." It was a family gathering. I descried no strangers, and no one
+not in uniform--unless you count the men too ill to don their blue
+slops: these had been brought in dressing-gowns or wrapped in blankets.
+No mere haphazard audience, this, of anybody and everybody who chooses
+to pay at a turnstile! Entrance to this hall is free ... but the price
+is beyond money, all the same.
+
+A family party it was, decidedly. Thick fumes of tobacco smoke uprose
+from it. (Shall we ever abandon the cigarette habit, now?) Orderlies
+continued to arrive and stow themselves discreetly in corners: by some
+strange providence each orderly had found that for a while he could be
+spared from ward or office. Staff-Sergeants, Sergeants,
+Corporals--mysteriously they made time to leave their various
+departments. Even a bevy of masseuses (those experts eternally on the
+rush from ward to ward) had peeped in to see the nigger minstrels. And
+everybody was pleased: every jest and every conundrum got its laugh,
+every ballad its applause. Not that we ever "give the bird" to those
+who come to amuse us. Offer us skill in any shape or form--pierrots,
+niggers, pianist, violinist, conjurer, ventriloquist, dancer, reciter:
+any or all of these will be appreciated warmly.
+
+Yesterday, for the nigger minstrels, there were no empty chairs. Until,
+in the midst of Part II ("A Laughable Sketch"--_vide_ the
+programme--wherein female rôles were doubly coy by reason of the
+masculinity of their falsetto dialogue and remarkable ankles) a
+messenger stole hither and thither, whispering to the orderlies, who
+promptly tiptoed from the room.
+
+A convoy of new arrivals demanded our presence.
+
+The silent ambulances were gliding up to the entrance of the hospital.
+Orderlies, fetched from their jobs and from the entertainment, lined up
+in the rain to take their places in the quartettes of bearers who lifted
+out the stretchers. The Assistant Matron, standing in the shelter of the
+door, checked her list; the Medical Officer handed out the ward tickets;
+the lady clerks from the Admission and Discharge Office took the
+patients' particulars. And the bathroom became very busy.
+
+As I started to wheel a much-bandaged warrior to his ward, the
+recreation-room door opened and a burst of music-cum-essence-of-nigger
+emerged on his astonished ears. I was a little doubtful as to whether
+our new guest would not think his reception somewhat flippant in key.
+The poor fellow was visibly suffering, and the sound of tambourines and
+comedians' guffaws seemed a scarcely proper comment on his condition. I
+might have spared myself these misgivings. "Say, chum," he interrogated
+me feebly, "what's that noise?" "Nigger minstrels, old man."
+"Golly!--and have I got to go straight to my bed?"
+
+Alas, he had to. It would be long before he could be well enough to be
+taken to one of our entertainments. But, had he been given his way, he
+would have gone direct from his fatiguing overseas journey into the Old
+Rec. to join the family party and chuckle at Mr. Bones and Massa
+Jawns'n.... No doubts assailed _his_ mind as to whether it was right to
+"waste bed-space" on mere frivolities. A nigger minstrel show was to him
+a deal more important, in fact, than his wound. And perhaps, in
+instinct, he was not far wrong.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+THE COCKNEY
+
+
+Before I enlisted I was lodging in a house which it was occasionally
+convenient to approach by a short cut through an area of slumland. One
+night when traversing this slum--the hour was 1.30 a.m.--I was stopped
+by a couple of women who told me that there was a man lying on the
+ground in an adjacent alley; they thought he must be ill; would I come
+and look at him?
+
+They led me down a turning which opened into a narrow court. This court
+was reached by an arched tunnel through tenement houses. The tunnel was
+pitchy black, but I struck matches as I proceeded, and presently we came
+upon the object of my companions' solicitude--a young soldier, propped
+against the wall and with his legs projecting across the flagstones.
+The women had, in fact, discovered him by tripping over those legs in
+the darkness.
+
+They were slatternly women, but warm-hearted; and when I had managed to
+arouse the gentleman in khaki and hoist him to his feet (for the cause
+of his indisposition was plain--and he had slept it off) they called
+down blessings on my head and overwhelmed our friend with sympathy which
+he did not wholly deserve and to which he made no rejoinder. Nor did he
+vouchsafe any very lucid answer when I asked him whither he was bound. I
+was prepared to pilot him--but I could hardly do so without knowing
+towards which point of the compass he proposed to steer, or rather, to
+be steered. "I know w'ere I wanter go," was all I could get out of him.
+Very well; if he knew his address, it was no concern of mine; he could
+lead on; I would act as a mere supporter. In this capacity, with my arm
+linked firmly in his, I brought him forth from the tunnel to the street
+(he had no wish, it seemed, to go through the tunnel into the court),
+and here we bade farewell to the ladies.
+
+"Which way now?" I inquired. My charge responded not, but crossed to a
+corner and meandered up one of those interminable thoroughfares which
+lead out of London into the suburbs. Trudging with him and helping him
+to sustain his balance, which was not as stable as could be wished, I
+plied him with mildly genial conversation and at last elicited a few
+vague answers. These were couched in the cockney idiom, but I caught a
+faint nasal twang which led me to suspect that the speaker had come from
+the other side of the Atlantic. Yes--he told me he had just arrived from
+Canada.
+
+We had proceeded a short distance when on the further side of the street
+I descried a golden halo which outlined the silhouette of a coffee
+stall. It occurred to me that a cup of hot coffee would be a good tonic
+to disperse the last symptoms of my friend's indiscretion, so I
+deflected him across the road, and we brought up, together, alongside
+the coffee-stall's counter.
+
+Lest the reader should be unacquainted with that unique creation, the
+coffee-stall, I must explain that it is nocturnal in habit, emerging
+from its lair only between the hours of 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. It is an
+equipage of which the interior is inhabited by a fat, jolly man (at
+least according to my experience he is always fat and jolly) surrounded
+by steaming urns, plates of cake, buns of a citron-yellow hue, pale
+pastries, ham sandwiches and packets of cigarettes. The upper panels of
+one of its sides unfold to form a bar below and a penthouse roof above,
+the latter being generally extended into an awning. The awning is a
+protection for the customer not against the sun--a luminary from whose
+assaults the London coffee-stalls have little to fear--but against the
+rain. Thanks to these awnings, and the chattiness of the fat, jolly man,
+and the warmth exhaled by the urns, and the circumstance that the public
+houses are shut, our coffee-stalls are able to sell two brownish
+beverages, called respectively coffee and tea, which otherwise could
+hardly hope to achieve the honour of human consumption.
+
+Fate has guided me on many midnight pilgrimages through the town, and I
+have imbibed, sometimes with relish, the liquids alluded to; I have also
+partaken of the pallid pastry and the citron-yellow buns. I am therefore
+in a position to write, for the benefit of persons less well informed, a
+treatise on coffee-stalls. This I shall refrain from doing. The one
+point it is necessary for me to mention is that the fat, jolly man,
+being deplorably distrustful, does not supply casual customers with
+teaspoons. You may have a cup of alleged tea (one penny) or a cup of
+alleged coffee (one penny); a dollop of sugar is dropped into the cup;
+the fat, jolly man gives the mixture a stir-round with a teaspoon; then
+he places the cup before you on the bar; but the teaspoon is still in
+his grasp. I dare say he would lend you the teaspoon if you requested
+him to do so; but unless you have that audacity he prefers to keep the
+teaspoon on his side of the bar, out of harm's way. This may seem
+strange, when you perceive that the teaspoon is fashioned of a metal
+unknown to silversmiths and might be priced at threepence. But even a
+threepenny teaspoon is a souvenir which some collectors would not
+despise.
+
+Presumably regular customers receive teaspoons, for teaspoons lie in a
+heap on the fat, jolly man's side of the counter. This was the case at
+the coffee-stall before which the young soldier and I ranged ourselves.
+And the heap of teaspoons seemed to exercise a curious fascination upon
+the soldier. He continued to stare at them for some minutes after I had
+set in front of him his cup of coffee. Then he stared at the fat, jolly
+man, who was cutting slabs from a loaf. He stared for a long time,
+making no reply to my remarks.
+
+Rain began to patter on the awning--it had rained earlier in the
+night--and I became aware of a figure, lurking in the background on the
+pavement, beyond the awning's shelter, but within the radius of the haze
+of light projected therefrom. It was a wretched, slinking figure, that
+of an elderly man with bleared eyes and a red nose: one of those pariahs
+who haunt cabstands and promote the cabs up the rank when the front
+vehicle is hailed. This special specimen of his breed appeared to be a
+satellite of the coffee-stall proprietor: perhaps he helped to tow the
+stall to its berth. Whatever might be his function, he lingered on the
+outskirts of the ring of light, watching us; and the young soldier, in
+his slow scrutiny of the stall and its surroundings, caught sight of
+him, and stared stolidly, as he had stared at everything else.
+
+I was in the act of drinking my coffee when the soldier suddenly leant
+across the counter, picked up a spoon, turned, and threw it at the
+derelict whose face wavered on the edge of the lamplight's circle. The
+victim of this extraordinary attack dodged the missile, then grovelled
+after it in the gutter. Meanwhile the fat man (instantaneously ceasing
+to be jolly) gave vent to an angry protest.
+
+"Wotcher do _that_ for? Chuckin' my spoons abart! Drunk, that's wot you
+are!"
+
+"Ain't drunk!" said the soldier.
+
+"Wotcher chuck my spoon at 'im for, then? 'E ain't done you no 'arm."
+
+"Yus 'e _'as_," was the soldier's surprising retort.
+
+"No 'e ain't."
+
+"Yus 'e _'as_."
+
+"No 'e 'ain't. 'E ain't done you no 'arm."
+
+To which the derelict chimed in (he had retrieved the spoon and now
+advanced timidly with it under the awning): "I ain't done _you_ no
+'arm"--a husky, whimpering chorus to his fat patron.
+
+The soldier fixed the derelict with a fierce glare. "Yus you _'ave_," he
+reiterated.
+
+I was wondering how the dispute might develop, but evidently my ear is
+unattuned to the nuances of these dialectics. The soldier's glare and
+the soldier's tone must have betrayed themselves to the two other men as
+factitious; the derelict, anyhow, lost his nervousness and, approaching
+nearer, scanned the soldier with dim, peering eyes; then broke into a
+joyous grin and exclaimed:
+
+"Lumme, if it ain't ol' Bert!"
+
+And the fat man, leaning on his counter, and likewise examining the
+soldier, cried, "Ol' Bert it is!"
+
+"Knew you in two ticks," grunted Bert. "Same ol' 'Arry." (This was the
+derelict.) "Same ol' 'Erb." (This was the fat--and once again
+jolly--man.)
+
+Explanations ensued. Bert, the young soldier, was a native of these
+parts. He had emigrated to Canada five years previously. To-night, _en
+route_ for the front, he had returned. Earlier in the evening there had
+been ill-advised libations; he had started for his home, felt sleepy,
+sheltered from the wet in a tunnel quite familiar to him, and there been
+discovered by the ladies and roused by myself. Arrived at the
+coffee-stall he had recognised in its proprietor a former pal and
+another former pal in 'Arry the derelict. To throw the spoon at 'Arry
+was merely his playful mode of announcing his identity.
+
+I left the trio reviewing the past and exchanging news of the present.
+My services, it was clear, would no longer be required by the prodigal.
+He and his mates gave me a hearty good-night.
+
+I did not guess how intimate was soon to be my association with the
+Berts and 'Arries and 'Erbs of the world. I was to be their servant, to
+wait upon them, to perform menial tasks for them, to wash them and dress
+them and undress them, to carry them in my arms. I was to see them
+suffer and to learn to respect their gameness, and the wry, "grousing"
+humour which is their almost universal trait. In my own wards, and
+elsewhere in the hospital, I came in close contact with many cockneys of
+the slums. Even when one had not precisely "placed" a patient of this
+description, the relatives who came to him on visiting days gave the
+clue to the stock from which he sprang. The mother was sometimes a
+"flower girl"; the sweetheart, with a very feathered hat, and hair which
+evidently lived in curling pins except on great occasions, probably
+worked in a factory. These people, if the patient were confined to bed,
+sat beside him and talked in a subdued, throaty whisper. But I have seen
+the same sort of patient, well enough to walk about, meet his folks on
+visiting afternoons at the hospital gate. There is a crowd at the
+hospital gate, passing in and going out; hosts of patients are waiting,
+some in wheeled chairs and some seated on the iron fence which fringes
+the drive. The reunions which occur at that gate are exceedingly public.
+Our East Ender is perhaps accustomed to publicity; his slum does not
+conceal its feelings--it quarrels, and makes love, without drawn blinds,
+and privacy is not an essential of its ardours. Be that as it may, these
+meetings at the hospital gate, which are not lacking in pathos, have
+sometimes manifested a tear-compelling comicality when the actors in the
+drama belonged to the class which produced Bert.
+
+In a higher class there is restraint and a rather stupid bashfulness. I
+have seen a wounded youngster flush apprehensively and only peck his
+mother in return for her sobbing embrace. That is not Bert's way. He
+knows--he is not a fool--that his mother looks a trifle absurd as, with
+bonnet awry, she surges perspiringly past the sentries, the tails of her
+skirt dragging in the dust and her feet flattened with the weight of
+over-clad, unwholesome obesity they have to bear. But he hobbles sprily
+to meet her, and his salute is no mere peck, but a smacking kiss, so
+noisy that it makes everyone laugh. He laughs too--perhaps he did it on
+purpose to raise a laugh: that is his quaint method; but the fact
+remains that, whatever his motive, he has managed to please his mother.
+She is sniffing loudly yet laughing also, and one could want no better
+picture of human affection than this of Bermondsey Bert and his
+shapeless, work-distorted, maybe bibulous-looking mother, exchanging
+that resounding and ungraceful kiss at the hospital gate. I have heard
+Bert shout "Mother!" from a hundred yards off, when he spied her coming
+through the gate. No false shame there! No smug "good form" in that--nor
+in the time-honoured jest which follows: "And 'ave you remembered to
+bring me a bottle of beer, mother?" (Of course visitors are not allowed
+to introduce alcohol into the hospital--otherwise I am afraid there is
+no doubt that mother would have obliged.)
+
+In one of our wards we harboured, for a while, a costermonger. This
+coster, an entertaining and plucky creature who had to have a leg
+amputated, received no callers on visiting day: his own relatives were
+dead and he and his wife had separated. "Couldn't 'it it orf," he
+explained, and with laudable impartiality added, "Married beneath 'er,
+she did, w'en she married me." As the lady was herself a coster, it was
+plain that here, as in other grades of society, there are degrees,
+conventions and barriers which may not be lightly overstepped. "Sister,"
+however, thought that the patient should inform his wife that he had
+lost his leg, and prevailed on him to send her a letter to that effect.
+A few days later he was asked,
+
+"Well, did you write and tell your wife you had lost a leg?"
+
+"Yus."
+
+"I suppose she's answered? What has she said?"
+
+"Said 'm a liar!"
+
+Her retort had neither disconcerted nor offended him. He was a
+philosopher--and, like so many of his kind, a laughing philosopher. When
+he was sufficiently recovered from his operation to get about on
+crutches he was the wag of the ward. He took a special delight in those
+practical jokes which are invented by patients to tease the nurses, and
+devoted the most painstaking ingenuity to their preparation. It was he
+who found a small hole in the lath-and-plaster wall which separates the
+ward from the ward's kitchen. Through this hole a length of cotton was
+passed and tied to the handle of a mug on the kitchen shelf. At this
+period, owing to the Zeppelin raids, only the barest minimum of light
+was allowed, and the night nurse, when she entered the kitchen, went
+into almost complete darkness. No sooner was she in the kitchen and
+fumbling for what she required than a faint noise--that of the cup being
+twitched by the cotton leading to the mischievous coster's bed--arose on
+the shelf and convinced her that she was in the presence of a mouse. She
+retreated, and perhaps if any convalescent patient had been awake she
+would have enlisted his aid to expel the mouse; but in the ward the
+patients were, as one man, snoring vociferously. It was this slightly
+overdone snoring, at the finish, which gave birth to suspicions and
+caused the trick to be detected.
+
+The night nurses do not have a placid time of it if their patients
+are at the stage of recovery when spirits begin to rise and
+the early slumber-hour which the hospital rules prescribe is not
+welcome. String-actuated knaveries, more or less similar to the
+mouse-in-the-kitchen one, are always devised for the plaguing of a new
+night nurse. Sometimes in the dead of night, when utter silence broods
+over the ward, the gramophone will abruptly burst into raucous music:
+its mechanism has been released by a contrivance which gives no clue to
+the crime's perpetrator. The flustered nurse gropes her way down the
+ward and stops the gramophone, every patient meanwhile sitting up in bed
+and protesting against her cruelty in having awakened them by starting
+it. Half an hour after the ward has quietened, the other gramophone
+(some wards own two) whirrs off into impudent song: it also has been
+primed. Nurse is wiser on future occasions: she stows the gramophones,
+when she comes on duty, where no one can tamper with them. Even so, she
+may have her nerves preyed upon by eerie tinklings, impossible to locate
+in the darkness; these are caused by two knives, hung from a nail fixed
+high up in the rafters. By jiggling a string, which is conducted over
+another rafter and down the wall to his pillow, the patient makes the
+knifeblades clash. Sometimes two strings, leading to different beds,
+complete this instrument of torture. After a determined search, nurse
+finds one string, and, having cut it, flatters herself that she has got
+the better of her enemies. Not a bit of it. She has scarcely settled in
+her chair again before the tinklings recommence. The second string is in
+action; and as she hunts about the ward for the source of the melody in
+the ceiling, muffled convulsions of mirth, from the dim rows of beds,
+furnish evidence that her naughty charges are not getting the repose
+which they require and to ensure which is part of the purpose of her
+presence.
+
+A nurse who happens to be unpopular never has these pranks played upon
+her. They are in the nature of a compliment. Nor do they occur in a
+ward where there is a patient seriously ill. It is impossible to imagine
+war-hospital patients acting inconsiderately towards a distressed
+comrade. This observation renders all the more amusing the scandalised
+concern which I once beheld on the demure physiognomy of a visiting
+clergyman when he gathered the drift of certain allusions to a case on
+the Danger List.
+
+The name of the Danger List explains itself. When a patient is put on
+the Danger List, his relatives are sent for and may be with him whether
+it is the visiting afternoon or not. (If they come from the provinces
+they are presented with a railway pass and, if poor, are allotted
+lodgings near the hospital, a grant being made to them from our
+Benevolent Fund.) For the information of the V.A.D.'s who answer
+visitors' questions in the Enquiry Bureau at the main entrance to the
+hospital, a copy of the Danger List hangs there, and it is on record
+that an awestruck child, seeing this column of patients' names, and
+reading the heading, asked, "What does 'Danger List' mean? Does it mean
+that it's dangerous to go near them?" Now in Ward C 22 a patient, a
+cockney, was on the Danger List--which circumstance availed nothing to
+depress his spirits. In spite of considerable pain, he poked fun at the
+prospect of his own imminent demise, and was himself the chief offender
+against the edict of quietness which "Sister" had issued for her ward.
+He _would_ talk; and he _would_ talk about undertakers, post-mortems,
+epitaphs and the details of a military funeral. "That there top note of
+the Last Post on the bugle doesn't 'arf sound proper," he said--a
+verdict which anyone who has heard this beautiful and inspired fanfare,
+which is the farewell above a soldier's grave, and which ends on a
+soaring treble, will endorse. "But," he went on, "if the bugler's 'ad a
+drop o' somethin' warm on the way to the cemetery, that there top note
+always reminds me of a 'iccup. An' if 'e 'iccups over me, I shall wanter
+spit in 'is eye, blimey if I won't."
+
+This persiflage had been going on for a couple of days and getting to be
+more and more elaborate and allusive, infecting the entire ward, so
+that the fact that the man was on the Danger List had become a kind of
+catchword amongst his fellows. Entered, in all innocence, the clergyman.
+("The very bloke to put me up to all the tricks!"--from the irreverent
+one.) At the same moment a walking patient, also a cockney, who had been
+reading a newspaper, gave vent to a cry of feigned horror. "Boys!" he
+announced, "it says 'ere there's a shortage of timber!"
+
+Guffaws greeted this sally. Everyone saw the innuendo at once--everyone
+except the clergyman, and when he grasped the point, that Ol' Chum
+So-and-So was on the Danger List and a shortage of timber was supposed
+to imply that he might be done out of a coffin, he was visibly shocked.
+Perhaps he did not understand cockney humour.... However, one may add
+that our irrepressible friend, at the moment of writing, is off the
+Danger List (albeit only after a protracted struggle with the Enemy at
+whom he jeered), and is now contriving to be as funny about life as he
+was funny--and fearless--about Death.
+
+I caught sight to-day of another cockney acquaintance of mine, whose
+Christian name is Bill, trundling himself down the hospital drive in a
+wheeled chair. Perched on the knee of his one leg, with its feet planted
+on the stump which is all that is left of the other, was his child, aged
+four. Beside him walked his wife, resplendent in a magenta blouse and a
+hat with green and pink plumes.
+
+The trio looked happy, and Mrs. Bill's gala attire was symbolical. When
+Bill was in my ward he too was on the Danger List. I remember that when
+he first came to us, before his operation, and before he took a turn for
+the worse, his wife visited him in that same magenta blouse (or another
+equally startling) and that for some reason she and "Sister" did not
+quite hit it off, "had words," and subsequently for a period were not on
+speaking terms. Later, when Bill underwent his operation, and began to
+sink, his bed was moved out on to the ward's verandah. Here his wife
+(now wearing a subdued blouse) sat beside him, hour after hour, while
+little Bill, the child, towed a cheap wooden engine up and down the
+grass patch, oblivious to the ordeal through which his parents were
+passing. It was my business, as orderly, to intrude at intervals upon
+the scene on the verandah, to bring Bill such food as he was able to
+tolerate. On the first occasion, after Bill's collapse, that I prepared
+to take him a cup of tea, Sister stopped me. "Don't forget to take tea,
+and some bread and butter, to that poor woman. She looks tired. And some
+milk for the child." "Very good, Sister." I cut bread-and-butter, and
+filled an extra mug of tea. "Orderly! What are you doing?" Sister had
+reappeared. And I was rebuked because I was going to offer Mrs. Bill her
+tea in a tin mug (the patients all have tin mugs) and had cut her
+bread-and-butter too thick. I must cut dainty slices of thin
+bread-and-butter, use Sister's own china ware, and serve the whole
+spread on a tray with a cloth. All of which was typical of Sister, who
+from that day treated Bill's wife with true tenderness; and Bill's wife
+became one of Sister's most enthusiastic adorers.
+
+It came to pass, after a week of pitiful anxiety, that the Medical
+Officer pronounced Bill safe once more. "Bloke says I'm not goin' ter
+peg art," he told me. I congratulated him and remarked that his wife
+would be thankful when he met her, on her arrival, with such splendid
+news. "I'll 'ave the larf of my missus," said Bill. "W'en she comes, I
+shall tell 'er I've some serious noos for 'er, and she's ter send the
+kid darn on the grarse ter play. Then I'll pull a long fice and hask 'er
+ter bear up, and say I'm sorry for 'er, and she mustn't tike it too
+rough, and all that; and she 'as my sympathy in 'er diserpointment: _she
+ain't ter get 'er widow's pension arter all_!"
+
+I believe that this programme was carried through, more or less to the
+letter. Certain it is that I myself overheard another of Bill's grim
+pleasantries. He was explaining to madame that they must apprentice
+their offspring to the engineering trade. "I wanter mike Lil' Bill a
+mowter chap, so's 'e can oil the ball-bearings of me fancy leg wot I'm
+ter get at Roehampton." The "fancy leg" ended by being the favourite
+theme of Bill's disgraceful extravaganzas. He would announce to Sister,
+when she was dressing his stump, that he had been studying means of
+earning his living in the future, and had decided to become a professor
+of roller skating. He would loudly tell his wife that she would never
+again be able to summons him for assault by kicking: the fancy leg would
+not give the real one sufficient purchase for an effective kick. And she
+was not to complain, in future, about his cold feet against her back in
+bed: there would be only one cold foot, the other would be unhitched and
+on the floor. And of course there were endless jokes about what had been
+done with the amputated leg, whether it had got a tombstone, and so
+forth: some of the suggestions going a trifle beyond what good taste, in
+more fastidious coteries, would have thought permissible. But Bill had
+his own ideas of the humorous, and maybe his own no less definite ideas
+of dignity. In this latter virtue I counted the fact that although once
+or twice, when he was very low, he gave way to a little fretting to me,
+he never, I am convinced, let fall one querulous word in the presence of
+his wife. She sat by her husband's side, and when things were at their
+worst the two said naught. The wife numbly watched her Bill's face,
+turning now and then to glance at the activities of little Bill with his
+engine, or to smile her thanks to the patients who sometimes came and
+gave the child pickaback rides. When I intruded, I knew I was
+interrupting the communings of a loving and happily married pair; and
+the "slangings" of each other which signalised Bill's recovery and his
+wife's relief, did nothing to shake my certitude that, like many slum
+dwellers, they owned a mutual esteem which other couples, of superior
+station, might envy.
+
+Personally I have never known a cockney patient who did not evoke
+affection; and as a matter of curiosity I have been asking a number of
+Sisters whether they liked to have cockneys in their wards. Without a
+single exception (and let me say that Sisters are both observant and
+critical) the answers have been enthusiastically in the affirmative.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+THE STATION PARTY
+
+
+An earnest shopman not long ago tried to sell me a pair of
+marching-boots, "for use"--as he explained, lest their name should have
+misled me--"on the march." Had he said "for use after the war" he might
+have been more persuasive. When I told him that marching-boots were no
+good to me, it was manifestly difficult for him to conceal his opinion
+that, if so, I had no business to flaunt the garb of Thomas Atkins. When
+I added that if he could offer me a pair of running-shoes I might
+entertain the proposition, his look was a reproach to irreverent
+facetiousness.
+
+A grateful country has presented me with one pair of excellent
+marching-boots. But a hospital ward is no place in which to go clumping
+about in footgear designed to stand hard wear and tear on the
+high-roads; and my army boots, after two years, have not yet needed
+re-soling. I wore them, it is true, during my period of service with the
+Chain Gang, as a squad of outdoor orderlies, engaged in road-making, was
+locally called. And I wear them when we have a "C.O.'s Parade"--an
+occasion on which naught but officially-provided attire is allowable. It
+would take a century of C.O.'s parades, however, to damage boots put on
+five minutes before the event and taken off five minutes after: the
+parade itself necessitating no sturdier pedestrianism than is involved
+in walking less than a hundred yards to the ground and there standing
+stock-still at attention.
+
+I do not say that hospital orderlies never go for a march: only that
+marching bulks relatively so small in our programme that any special
+equipment for the purpose sounds a little ironical. The issue of
+ward-shoes, now, was a real boon. Not that all the pairs with which our
+unit was suddenly flooded by the authorities proved as silent as they
+were intended to be. Some of them squeaked; and the peregrinations of
+the orderly thus afflicted were perhaps more vexatious to the ear of a
+nervous patient at night than even the clatter of honest hobnails. And
+the soles were thin. A pair of ward-shoes lasted me on the average one
+month. If only worn within the ward they might have lasted
+longer--though not so very much longer. According to regulations, you
+were not allowed to wear ward-shoes except within the confines of the
+ward. No doubt it was expected that every time you were sent on an
+errand outside the ward you would solemnly take off your ward-shoes and
+put on your marching-boots--then, on the return, take off your
+marching-boots and put on your ward-shoes--but life as a nursing orderly
+is too short for such elaborations of etiquette. It was nothing unusual,
+when one was working in a ward which lay at a distance of quarter of a
+mile from the hospital's main building, to be sent to the said main
+building a dozen times in a single morning. This incessant
+message-bearing had to be done, if not at the double, at any rate at
+nothing slower than five miles per hour in the morning (the busy time);
+in the afternoon a speed of four miles per hour might sometimes be
+permissible. At all events, running-shoes, as I told the shopman, would
+not have been inappropriate during certain periods of crisis.
+
+From time to time our tasks were interrupted by the notes of a bugle--or
+the shrilling of the Sergeant-Major's whistle--demanding our presence
+for an intake of new patients. A party of orderlies was wanted to go to
+the railway-station to help to remove stretcher-cases from the ambulance
+train. The station lies at a distance of a mile from the hospital, and
+this small pilgrimage, achieved a few score times, is practically all I
+know of the veritable employment of marching-boots.
+
+I regretted when a change of plans diverted the ambulance trains to the
+central termini for evacuation. The interlude of a station-party trip
+was far from unwelcome. Lined up on the parade ground we were put in
+charge of a corporal. "Party, 'shun! Right turn! Quick march!" Off we
+trudged, round the back of the hospital, down the drive, out past the
+sentry and away along the road. Presently, "Party, march at ease!"
+Cigarettes were lit, talking was allowed, and someone would raise a
+tune. How pleasant it is to march to singing! To march to a
+drum-and-fife band must be wonderful. Or a brass band--! Those joys will
+never be mine. Almost all the marching I shall have done in the great
+war will be summed up in these tiny promenades from the hospital to the
+railway-station, their rhythm sustained by self-raised choruses, none
+too melodious.
+
+Occasionally an officer would be descried, on the pavement. Then "Party,
+'shun!" Cigarettes were concealed. The song died. "Eyes left! ... Eyes
+front! Party, march at ease!" The cigarettes reappeared, the song was
+resumed. Approaching the station, "Party, 'shun!" Cigarettes were thrown
+away. Here, in the chief street, we must make a smart show. A crowd is
+gathered round the station gate, attracted by the array of Red Cross
+vehicles within. Police are keeping back the curious. The way is
+cleared for our arrival. "Left wheel!" Now is our one moment of glory.
+We swing round, through the lane of gaping sightseers, and tramp-tramp
+in style across the station yard and under the archway, flattering
+ourselves (perhaps not without justification) that there are spectators
+whose eyes pursue us with secret envy at the serious import of our task.
+
+The station platform, when we reached it, was generally a blank
+perspective devoid of all living creatures except ourselves. Fate
+decreed that we should be summoned long before the train was due. I have
+kicked my heels for many a doleful hour on that platform, and the
+reflection that "they also serve who only stand and wait" was chilly
+comfort if--as frequently happened--we had been hurried off dinnerless.
+The convoys' arrivals always seemed to coincide with dinner-time. On our
+return to the hospital we should find that the rations had been kept hot
+for us. But, in the meanwhile, an empty stomach was a poor preparation
+for the strain of carrying stretchers up the stairs from the station
+platform to the ambulances; and those of us who could produce pennies
+for automatic-machine chocolate gained an instant popularity. The
+longest period of waiting drew to an end at last, however. The platform
+assumed a livelier air. The station-master appeared from his den.
+Officers of the Army Medical Service and the Red Cross strolled down.
+And the stairs and platform echoed to the pattering of the feet of hosts
+of industrious "Bluebottles," fetching stretchers and blankets.
+
+The blue-uniformed volunteers who form a portion of the London Ambulance
+Column are nicknamed the Bluebottles in allusion to their dress. It is a
+nickname which, let me say at once, any man might be proud of. I know
+not whether the history of the Bluebottles has yet been written, but
+certain it is that their doings have got into newspaper print less often
+than they deserved. For theirs is a double rôle which truly merits the
+country's admiration. While carrying on the commerce of the Empire--that
+vital commerce without which there would be bankruptcy and no sinews of
+war, nor indeed any England left to defend--they have vowed themselves
+also, of their own free-will, to the helping of the wounded. Day or
+night the Bluebottle is liable to be called from his desk or his home by
+the telephone: like the Florentine Brother of the Misericordia he must
+instantly hurry into his uniform and rush to the place appointed. He may
+be busy or he may be tired; no matter: his vow holds good. Off he goes,
+to the railway-station to meet the hospital train and evacuate its
+stretchers.
+
+Myself, I have the deepest respect for the Bluebottles and for their
+energy in a cause which must often be not only fatiguing, but, from a
+commercial point of view, extremely inconvenient. It would be absurd to
+pretend, nevertheless, that the less responsible khaki-wearing R.A.M.C.
+do not cherish a mild contempt for all Bluebottles. There is no reason
+for that contempt. It is idiotic, childish--a humiliating exhibition of
+the silliness of masculine human nature. Members of our station-party
+who had enlisted but a week back, and who knew nothing whatever of
+their work, would, in a whisper, mock the Bluebottles--although every
+Bluebottle had taken first-aid classes and passed examinations at which
+most of the mockers would have boggled. The Bluebottles were "civilians"
+... there you have it. We--who would probably never do any battlefield
+soldiering in our lives--looked down on all civilians who had the
+impudence to wear a uniform of any sort. Such is the behaviour of the
+sterner sex at a moment when its sole thought should be of sensible and
+efficient co-operation in the performance of duty.
+
+For of course it was our duty to co-operate with the Bluebottles. The
+theory with which we beguiled ourselves, that the Bluebottles were
+physically starvelings and required our Herculean aid to lift the
+stretchers up the stairs, was palpably nonsense. Still we told ourselves
+that we, as disciplined soldiers, were here to give a hand to a civilian
+mob who might otherwise faint and fail. A singular delusion! Time has
+proved its falsity, for with the issue of fresh orders our
+station-parties ceased to function: the Bluebottles now make shift
+without us--and without, as far as I know, any mishap.
+
+The hospital train was eventually signalled. We were ranked, at
+attention, at the foot of the stairs. The Bluebottles stood by their
+stretchers. There was hurrying hither and thither of officials.
+Sometimes our Colonel, having motored from the hospital, appeared on the
+platform to see that all was well, and you may be sure that we
+endeavoured to look alert in his august presence. And finally the train
+glided into the station.
+
+The hospital trains seemed to be never twice the same: South Westerns,
+North Westerns, Great Northerns, Midlands, Great Centrals, Lancashire
+and Yorkshires--I saw them all, at one time or another, their sole
+affinity being the staring red crosses painted on each coach. A coach or
+two consisted of ordinary compartments, for sitting-up cases; the rest
+were vans the interiors of which had been converted into wards by means
+of bunks. Access to each van-ward was gained by a wide pair of sliding
+doors in its centre. These doors, when the train had come to a
+standstill, were opened by pallid-looking orderlies, who lowered
+gangways and then gazed forth at us, while they awaited orders, with the
+lack-lustre eyes of men who had been deprived of the proper allowance of
+sleep.
+
+As soon as the list of the Medical Officer on the train had been checked
+with that of the Medical Officer on the platform, the evacuation began.
+Walking-cases were sent off first--generally a tatterdemalion crew,
+hobbling and shuffling along the platform, and, at one stage of the war,
+with trench mud still clinging to their clothes. They seldom needed our
+assistance: the Bluebottles (even if feeble folk) were deemed by our
+corporal to be fit to give any weak walking patient an arm, or carry his
+kit. The walking patients, in fact, were a mere episode. Motor-cars
+whirled them off, five or six at a time, and they might be half through
+the process of being bathed at the hospital before the last
+stretcher-case was quit of the train. The stretcher cases were our
+concern. Pairs of Bluebottles, each carrying a stretcher, entered the
+van-wards and anon reappeared with their burden. Now came our cue to
+act. As the stretcher approached the foot of the stair two of our number
+stepped forth from the rank, each taking a handle from a Bluebottle; the
+stretcher thus proceeded on its course up the stair carried by four men,
+one on each handle--two Bluebottles and two R.A.M.C.'s.
+
+That flight of iron stairs from the platform to the road seemed no very
+arduous ordeal for the first half-dozen journeys. There was a knack
+about keeping the stretcher horizontal: the front bearers must hold
+their handles as low as possible; the rear bearers must hoist their
+handles shoulder-high. It was all plain sailing and perfectly easy. Four
+men to a stretcher is luxurious. At least it is luxurious on the level,
+and if you have not far to go and not many consecutive stretchers to
+carry. But when the convoy was a large one, when the bearers were too
+few and you had no sooner got rid of one stretcher than you must run
+down the stairs and, without regaining your breath, grab the handle of
+another and slowly toil up again to the ambulances ... yes, even on the
+coldest day it was possible to be moist with perspiration; and as for
+the hot weather of the 1915 summer, when one of our Big Pushes was
+afoot, or when returned prisoners came from Germany (those were
+memorable occasions!)--you might be pardoned a certain aching in the
+arm-muscles.
+
+It was on one of these busy days that I discovered that the comical
+prejudice of khaki against the Bluebottles was not (as I had hitherto
+supposed) confined to the young swashbucklers of the home-staying
+R.A.M.C. It was seldom our custom to enter the hospital trains. An
+unwritten law decreed that Bluebottles only should enter the train: the
+R.A.M.C. limited themselves to carrying work outside, on the platform
+and stair. But on this occasion the supply of Bluebottles had, for the
+moment, run short, and our party took a turn at going up the gangways
+and evacuating the van-wards. As it happened, I and my mate on the
+stretcher were the first khaki-wearers to invade that particular
+van-ward. And as we steered our stretcher in at the door and down the
+aisle of cots a shout arose from the wounded lying there: "Here are some
+real soldiers!"
+
+It was too bad. It was base ingratitude to the devoted band of
+Bluebottles who had, up till that instant, been toiling at the
+evacuation of the ward--and who, as I chanced to know, had been up all
+the previous night, carrying stretchers at Paddington and Charing Cross,
+while _we_ slept cosily. But--well, there it was. "Here are some real
+soldiers!" Khaki greeted khaki--simultaneously spurning the mere
+amateur, the civilian. I could have blushed for the injustice of that
+naïve cry. But it would be dishonest not to confess that there was
+something gratifying about it too. It was the cry of the Army, always
+loyal to the Army. These heroic bundles of bandages, lifting wild and
+unshaven faces from their pillows, hailed _me_ (a wretched creature who
+had never heard a gun go off) as one of their comrades! My mate and I,
+as we adjusted our stretcher at a cot's side, and braced ourselves
+against the weight of the patient, winked covertly at one another. "A
+nasty one for the Bluebottles!" he said. And it was.
+
+All the same I seize this opportunity of offering my homage to the
+Bluebottles. They have done--are still doing--their bit, and that right
+nobly. Thousands of British soldiers have cause to bless them and also
+to be thankful for the existence of that great voluntary institution,
+the London Ambulance Column.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When at last the train had been emptied and the ultimate stretcher was
+_en route_ for the hospital, our party gathered once more at the top of
+the stair, lined up, and was glanced-over by the corporal lest any man
+had seized the opportunity to play truant. There were occasions when
+some thirsty soul, chafing at the rigours of the strict teetotalism
+enforced by our rules, was found to have vanished in the hurly-burly:
+his destination, the up-platform refreshment-bar, being readily
+surmisable. He had cause to regret his lapse if it were noticed before
+he slipped back unostentatiously into our ranks. Then, "Party, 'shun!
+Left turn! Right incline--quick march!" Off we swung, out into the
+streets--cheered by the urchins who still hovered round the gate--and
+so, at the rapidest possible pace, home to dinner and a smoke: these (in
+my case at any rate) being preceded by the thankful relinquishment of my
+seldom-worn and therefore none too friendly marching-boots.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+SLANG IN A WAR HOSPITAL
+
+
+Every ward in the hospital has a bathroom attached to it, but in
+addition to these there are two large bathrooms, each containing a
+number of baths, which are used by walking patients and also by the
+orderlies. The more recently built of these bathrooms is divided into
+private cubicles. In the older one the baths are on a more sociable
+plan, with no partition walls sundering them. The spectacle, in the
+"old" bathroom, when a convoy of walking cases has arrived, is one which
+should appeal to a painter. Clouds of steam fill the air, and through
+the fog you perceive a fine mêlée of figures, some half dressed, some
+statuesquely nude, towelling themselves or preparing to wash, or shaving
+at bits of mirror propped on the window-sills. Pink bodies wallow
+voluptuously in the deep porcelain-ware tubs, which are of the shape and
+superb dimensions of Egyptian sarcophagi. Sometimes a patient with a
+wounded arm, unable to help himself, is being soaped and sponged by an
+orderly; or you may see a cheerful soul, with an injured foot, balanced
+on the rim of the bath and giving himself all the ablutions which are
+practicable without the disturbance of bandages. No one who has
+frequented our bathrooms would ever doubt that the British Army loves
+cleanliness and hot water. Of cold water I cannot speak with the same
+enthusiasm.
+
+A newly-arrived convoy of course monopolises the bathroom; but
+throughout the whole day, at almost any hour, you will find a patient or
+two here; for by the rule of the hospital it is allowable for any
+patient--once he has been given permission to take an unsupervised bath
+at all--to take a bath whenever he likes. Consequently it happens often
+that half a dozen orderlies may be bathing at the same time as half a
+dozen patients--and it need not be added that the occasion is one for
+pleasant chats and the barter of anecdotes. For this reason, if for no
+other, I always elected to use the "old" bathroom: the "new" one, with
+its closed cubicles, was less fruitful in conversations.
+
+The "old" bathroom was the exchange (and perhaps the starting-point) of
+many of our hospital rumours. I imagine that every war hospital is a
+hotbed of rumours. Ours certainly was, and is. Amongst the orderlies
+there are incessant rumours about promotions, about the chances of the
+unit being sent abroad, about surprise inspections, about the imminent
+arrival of impossibly large convoys, about news--received privately by
+the Colonel over the telephone--of defeats or victories. Nine times out
+of ten the rumour turns out to be groundless. But this does not cause
+the output of rumours to diminish. Apparently the army is a prolific
+soil for rumours, inasmuch as they have a special name: a rumour is
+called a _buzz_. "Only a buzz" ("it's only a rumour") is an expression
+often heard on the lips of soldiers. In India it is sometimes "a bazaar
+buzz" (a rumour circulating in the bazaars); here it is, naturally, a
+bathroom buzz.
+
+Many were the choice examples of slang and of colloquialisms which I
+culled in the bathroom, sitting comfortably in my bath and communing
+with my neighbour in the next bath. I remember one morning making the
+acquaintance of an Australian who had recently recovered from a bad
+attack of trench feet. Four of the toes of one foot were missing, and
+the fifth looked far from sound. My friend was examining this lonely toe
+with a critical gaze, and I sympathised with him over its condition.
+"Ah!" he said, "that toe is a king to what it was." He went on to tell
+me (what I could well believe) that to get your "plates of meat"
+frostbitten wasn't such a "cushy wound" as it was cracked up to be by
+those who had never experienced its sufferings. "When I went sick the
+doctor thought he'd rumbled me swinging the lead. But as soon as he
+spotted them there toes of mine--the ones that's gone--I could see he
+knew I'd clicked a packet, square dinkum, this trip." ("Square dinkum"
+or "dinkum" is an Antipodean verbal flourish, which broadly
+approximates to the American "Sure enough" or the English "Not 'arf.")
+
+Certain of these neologisms are common enough in civilian life--have
+been imported into the army since 1914--but others (and the more
+interesting ones, as I hold) were, until the war, limited to the
+barrack-room. British regiments which had been abroad used an argot of
+considerable antiquity, some of it of Oriental origin (_e.g._ "blighty,"
+meaning "home": hence "a blighty wound," or simply "a blighty," an
+injury sufficiently serious to cause the victim to be invalided to
+England). Whether the derivations of army slang have been investigated I
+do not know. It appears to me to be a subject worth examination. I am
+not myself a philologist, but in the bathrooms and elsewhere in the
+hospital I have heard and noted a small collection of slang phrases and
+idioms, and these may be worth recording. Such expressions as "swinging
+the lead" (malingering or deceiving or acting in a hypocritical manner
+or getting the better of anyone) have lost their novelty. So has
+"rumbled," which means to be discovered or detected or found out. These
+words have now spread far beyond the confines of the army. And indeed
+the rapidity with which all slang and all catch-phrases can be
+disseminated offers a rather alarming prospect. For whereas, before the
+war, slang at its silliest was often quite local, nowadays its
+restriction within given localities has in the nature of things become
+impossible. A war hospital such as ours contains inmates from every
+county in Britain, as well as from every colony. The same intermingling
+occurs on an infinitely greater scale in training-camps and at the
+various fronts. All these centres are hotbeds of slang: the men go home
+from them, carrying to their native places slang which would never, in
+ordinary times, have penetrated there. In the army you will hear a
+Scotchman doing what he never did before--dropping his aitches. He has
+caught it from his English comrades. You will hear him say "Not
+'arf"--an inane tag which, despite its popularity in London, failed to
+find any foothold north of the Tweed before the war. "Not 'arf" was
+mouthed by Sassenach comedians on the music-hall stages of Edinburgh
+and Glasgow, and was grinned at for what it was worth: the streets did
+not adopt it. Now the streets will hear it and will use it: it is one of
+Jock's souvenirs from his campaign.
+
+I am afraid that another triviality which has hitherto been to the taste
+only of the south of England is fated to "catch on," by means of the
+same missionaries, from Land's End to John o' Groat's, and even in the
+colonies. Rhyming slang is extraordinarily common in the army, so common
+that it is used with complete unconsciousness as being correct
+conversational English. My friend of the king-like toe spoke of his feet
+as "plates of meat"--and this though he was an Australian, not a
+cockney. If he had had occasion to allude to his leg he would probably
+have called it "Scotch peg." A man's arm is his "false alarm"; his nose,
+"I suppose"; his eye, "mince pie"; his hand, "German band"; his boot,
+"daisy root"; his face "chevvy chase"; and so forth--an interminable
+list. What exactly was the _raison d'être_ of this pseudo-poetic mania I
+do not know, but I suspect that it originated, in the distant past,
+with the poverty of rhyme-invention on the part of the writers of the
+cruder kind of pantomime songs--"round the houses," for example, being
+both a rhyme to and a synonym for "trousies" (garments beloved of those
+bards!)--and thus the vogue developed. This is only a theory. The one
+thing certain is that a clumsy form of slang, devoid of the humour and
+compactness which justify slang--and which were on the whole once
+characteristic of metropolitan slang--has tickled the ear of some
+millions of men who, but for the war, would never have fallen under its
+temptation. The only thing to hope for is that it will run its course
+and perish--like "What ho, she bumps!" and "Now we shan't be
+long!"--without leaving any visible and permanent trace upon the
+language.
+
+"Clicked," another word used by my trench-feet associate, resembles much
+modern slang in the breadth and elasticity of its application. To click
+can be either advantageous or baneful, according to the circumstances. A
+soldier asks a superior for a favour, and it is granted. That soldier
+has clicked. Or if he finds a nice girl to walk out with, he has
+clicked. Or if he is given a coveted post, he has clicked. But he has
+also clicked if he is suddenly seized on to do some menial duty. He has
+clicked if he is discovered in a misdeed. And he has clicked a packet if
+he gets into trouble generally. On such an occasion, it may be added,
+the N.C.O. or officer who administers a reproof ("ticks him off"), and
+does so in angry terms, "goes in off the deep end."
+
+Not all army slang is lacking, indeed, in a facetious irony. Miserable
+conditions in the desert or in the trenches, bad accommodation, doubtful
+food--anything which cannot arouse the faintest enthusiasm of any
+sort--these, in the lingo of our now much-travelled and stoical troops,
+are "nothing to write home about." Surely there is an admirable spirit
+in this sarcasm. It crops up again in the hospital metaphor "going to
+the pictures." That is Tommy's way of announcing that he is to go under
+the surgeon's knife, on a visit to the operating theatre. Again, there
+is a sardonic tang in the army's condemnation of one who has been
+telling a far-fetched story: he has been "chancing his arm" (or "mit").
+Similarly one detects an oblique and wry fun in the professional army
+man's use of the word "sieda" to mean "socks." (The new army more feebly
+dubs them "almond rocks.") "Sieda" has been brought by the Anzacs from
+Cairo, and with them it means "Good morning!"--a mere friendly hail, now
+used with great frequency. But the veterans of older expeditions in
+Egypt and in India, when they had been on the march, took their socks
+from their perspiring feet and lay down to sleep; and in the
+morning--well, their socks said "Sieda!" to them when they awoke, and
+were christened accordingly.... Or again, the socks (or other property)
+might have vanished in the night--in which case there had been "hooks
+about" (pilferers about). If one of those "hooks" were caught, he would
+be first "rammed in the mush" (put in the guardroom), and then, if his
+guilt were established, he would be observed "going over the wall" or
+"going to stir" (going to the detention prison).
+
+A few other slang words which I have come across in the hospital, and
+which seem to me to bear the mark of the old army as distinct from the
+new, are: "bondook," a rifle; "sound scoff" (to the bugler, to sound
+Rations); "scran," victuals, rations; "weighing out," paying out;
+"chucking a dummy," being absent; "get the wind up," be afraid (and "put
+the wind up," make afraid); "the home farm," the married quarters;
+"chips," the pioneer sergeant (carpenter); "tank," wet canteen;
+"tank-wallah," a drinker; "tanked," drunk; "A.T.A. wallah," a
+teetotaller (from the Army Temperance Association); "on the cot" or "on
+the tack," being teetotal; "jammy," lucky (and "jam," any sort of good
+fortune); "win," to steal; "burgoo," porridge; "eye-wash," making things
+outwardly presentable; "gone west," died (also applied to things broken,
+_e.g._ a broken pipe has "gone west"); "oojah," anything (similar to
+thingummy or what-d'ye-call-it); "push," "pusher," or "square push," a
+girl (hence "square-push tunic," the "swagger" tunic for walking-out
+occasions). The words for drunkenness are innumerable--"jingled,"
+"oiled," "tanked to the wide," "well sprung," "up the pole," "blotto,"
+etc.; but I smell the modern in some of these; their flavour is of
+London taverns rather than of the dusty barrack squares of India, Egypt,
+Malta, and Gibraltar.
+
+But who can delve to the ultimate springs of slang? A verb which I never
+met before I enlisted was "to spruce." This is almost, if not quite, a
+blend of "swinging the lead" and "doing a mike." To spruce is to dodge
+duty or to deceive. A man who contrived to slip out of the ranks of a
+squad when they were performing some distasteful task would be said to
+"spruce off." Or he would be denounced as a "sprucer" if he managed to
+arrive late for his meal and yet, by a trick, to secure a front place in
+the waiting queue at the canteen. A word in constant employment,
+"spruce"! It was new to me when I became an orderly, and for a long time
+I thought that it was peculiar to our unit, in the same manner that the
+jargon of certain boys is peculiar to certain schools. But I concluded
+later that it might have a remote and roundabout origin in the old army
+slang, "a spruce hand" at "brag"--the latter being a variant of the game
+of poker, and a spruce hand, apparently, one which, held by a bluffer,
+contained cards of no real value.
+
+Some day these etymological mysteries must be probed. Perhaps the German
+professors, after the war, can usefully wreak themselves on this complex
+and obscure research. Meanwhile the above notes are offered not as a
+serious contribution to a subject so immense, but rather as a warning.
+The infectiousness of slang is incredible; and this gigantic
+inter-association of classes and clans has brought about a hitherto
+unheard-of levelling-down of the common speech. Accent may or may not be
+influenced: the vocabulary undoubtedly is. Nearly every home in the land
+is soon going to be invaded by many forms of army slang: the process in
+fact has already begun. If we were a sprightlier nation the effect might
+not be all to the bad. But most of our slang-mongers are not wits. "He
+was balmy a treat," I heard a soldier say of another soldier who had
+shammed insane. That is what we are coming to: it is the tongue we
+shall use and likewise (I fear) the condition in which some of us will
+find ourselves as a result.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+A BLIND MAN'S HOME-COMING
+
+
+In my boyhood I had the ambition--it was one of several ambitions--to
+become a courier. The _Morning Post_ advertisements of couriers who
+professed to be fluent in a number of languages and were at the disposal
+of invalid aristocrats desiring to take extensive (and expensive) trips
+abroad, aroused the most romantic visions in my mind. A courier's was
+the life for me. I saw myself whirling all over Europe--with my
+distinguished invalid--in sleeping-cars de luxe. Anon we were crossing
+the Atlantic or lolling in punkah-induced breezes on the verandahs of
+Far Eastern hotels. It was a great profession, that of the experienced
+and successful courier.
+
+I have never been a courier in quite this picturesque acceptation; and
+yet, in a humbler sense, I have perhaps (to my own surprise) earned the
+title. As an R.A.M.C. orderly I have more than once officiated as
+travelling courier--yes, and to distinguished, if far from affluent,
+invalids. They ought, at least, to rank as distinguished; for the reason
+they needed a courier was because they had given their health, or limbs,
+or eyesight, in defence of their country.
+
+It happens only too often that when a patient is discharged from
+hospital he is not fit to make his journey home alone. An orderly is
+detailed to accompany him. Sometimes the lot has fallen on me. Generally
+the trip is a short one, to some outlying suburb of London or to some
+town or village in the home counties; but sometimes my flights have been
+further afield, to Ireland, or Wales; and once I went to Yorkshire with
+a blind man.
+
+That Yorkshire expedition was singularly lacking in drama and in surface
+pathos, yet its details remain with great clearness. The piece of
+damaged goods which, being of no further fighting use, was being
+returned with thanks to the hearthside from whence it came, was an
+individual answering to the unheroic cognomen of Briggs. A
+high-explosive shell had been sent by the Gods to alter the current of
+Briggs's career. Briggs came through all that part of the war which
+concerned him without a scratch upon his person--only after the arrival
+in his immediate vicinity of the high-explosive shell he was
+unfortunately unable to see. Never again would Briggs be of the
+slightest value either as a soldier or in his civilian trade, which was
+that of driver of ponies in a coal-mine. Consequently, as a
+distinguished invalid (with the sum of one pound in his pocket to
+comfort him until such time as his pension should materialise),
+Mister--no longer Private--Briggs, for the first and presumably the last
+time in his existence, went travelling with a courier.
+
+A car supplied by the National Motor Volunteer Service awaited Briggs
+and his courier at the hospital entrance. Here the introduction between
+Briggs and his courier took place. Ours is a large hospital, and I had
+never to my knowledge encountered Briggs before that moment. I beheld a
+young fellow (he was only twenty-three) with a stout, healthy visage
+which wore a pleasant smile and would have been describable as roguish,
+only ... well, the eyes of a blind man, whatever else they are, are not
+conducive to a roguish mien. They were eyes not visibly damaged: nice
+blue eyes. And they stared at nothingness. I was in the presence of a
+stripling who, a few weeks ago, must have owned a mobile face, and was
+in rapid process of developing a quite different face, a face which
+still might--it certainly did--grin and laugh, but which would gradually
+gain, had already begun to gain, a set expressionlessness that overlaid
+and strangely neutralised its grins and its laughter.
+
+Blind men's faces may have beauty, even vivacity, or a heightened
+intelligence and fire; but there is a something, hard to define, of
+which they are sadly devoid. The windows of the soul are dimmed. The
+face inevitably changes. And if even I, who knew not Briggs, could
+perceive that Briggs's face must thus have changed, how much more
+conspicuous would the change be to the partner whom Briggs had left
+seven months before and to whom I was now leading him back--his wife.
+
+Briggs, a civilian once more, sported reach-me-down garments which
+fitted him surprisingly--our Clothing Store sergeant is the kindest of
+souls and expends infinite patience on doing his best, with
+government-contract tailoring, to suit all our discharges. His overcoat,
+which might have been called a Chesterfield in Shoreditch, pleased
+Briggs, as he told me in the car: he drew my attention to its texture
+and warmth, he admiringly fingered it. "I might ha' paid thirty bob for
+that there top-coat," he surmised. "A collar an' a tie an' all, too!
+Them boots ain't so dusty, neither: they fit me a treat. Goin' 'ome to
+my missus in Sunday clobber, I am." You would have said that he thought
+he had emerged from his hazards with rather a good bargain. A jumble of
+ready-made clothes--and a pension! The visible world gone for ever!
+These were his souvenirs of the great war. And, "Ah," he said, when I
+ventured on some allusion to his blindness, "it might ha' bin worse. I
+don' know what I'd ha' done if I'd lost a leg, same as some of them
+other poor jossers in th' hospital!"
+
+(And this, marvellous though it sounds, is the standpoint of no small
+number in the legion of our Briggses.)
+
+The motor ride was another source of gratification to Briggs. Seated
+beside me, the wind beating on his sightless orbs, he discoursed of the
+wonders of petrol. "Proper to take you about, them cars. W'ere are we
+now? 'Ave we far to run, like?" I told him we were traversing Battersea
+Park and that our destination was St. Pancras. It transpired that he was
+a stranger to London. This drive through London was, as it were, an item
+in his collection of experiences, to be preserved with the cross-channel
+voyage and the vigils in the trenches. "Shall we go by Buckingham
+Palace?" I told him we shouldn't; then, observing that he was
+disappointed, I asked the driver to make the détour. So at last I was
+able to inform Briggs that we were passing Buckingham Palace: I turned
+his head so that he looked straight towards that architectural
+phenomenon. It was, of course, invisible to him. No matter. He wished to
+be able to boast, to his wife, that he had seen (he used that verb) the
+house where the King lived.
+
+His wife--he married a month before he enlisted--had been notified of
+his return; but I suggested that at St. Pancras we might telegraph to
+her the actual hour of the train's arrival, in case she should desire to
+meet it. The idea commended itself to Briggs: he had not thought of such
+a thing: telegraphing had perhaps hardly come within his purview, at
+least so I surmised when, the telegraph-form before me, I asked him what
+he wished me to write. He began cheerily, as though dictating a letter
+of gossip:--"_My dear wife_--" Economy necessitated a taboo of this
+otherwise charming method of communication. "_Arriving Bradford
+five-thirty, Tom_," was the result of final boilings-down, which took so
+long that we nearly achieved the anticlimax of missing our train
+altogether.
+
+Now at Bradford (at the end of one of the chattiest five hours I ever
+spent in my life) no Mrs. Briggs was perceptible. I kept my patient on
+the platform until every other passenger had gone: I marched him up and
+down the main area of the station. Each time I caught sight of a woman
+who looked a possible Mrs. Briggs I steered my charge into her vicinity.
+In spite of a piece of information which Briggs had imparted to me on
+the journey--namely, that he expected soon to become a father--I was
+surprised that his wife had not come to the station to welcome him.
+However, it was plain that Briggs himself was not particularly
+surprised, nor, what was more important, disappointed. Nothing could
+damp his eternal placidity and good humour. He proposed that from this
+point onward he should pursue his journey alone. "Nowt to do but git on
+th' tram," he said. "It's a fair step from 'ere, but I knows every inch
+of t' way." At all events (as of course I could not allow this) he would
+now act as my guide. And he did. "First to the right.... Now we're goin'
+by a big watchmaker's-and-jeweller's.... Now cross t' street.... Now on
+th' corner over there by t' Sinnemer is w'ere we git our tram."
+
+The tram in due course appeared, and we boarded it. "Tha mun pay
+thrippence only, mind," he warned me when the conductor came round.
+"It's a rare long ride for thrippence." So it proved to be--through
+wildernesses which were half meadow and half slum, my cicerone at every
+hundred yards pointing out the notable features of the landscape. On our
+left I ought to see the so-and-so public house; on our right the
+football ground--I should know it by the grand-stand jutting above the
+palings; further on were brickworks; further still a factory which, my
+nose would have told me, even if Mr. Briggs had not, dealt with
+chemicals; then, on the skyline, a pit-head; then another; then a mining
+village with three different kinds of methodist church and two picture
+palaces; then a gap of dreary, dirty fields. And then, nearing dusk, the
+village where my friend lived, and where also was the terminus of the
+tram route.
+
+We quitted the tram and walked down a street of those squalid brick
+tenements which coal-mining seems to germinate like a rash upon the
+earth's surface. The debris and the scaffoldings of pits were dotted
+about the adjacent countryside. Sooty cabbage-patches occupied the
+occasional interspaces in the ranks of houses. Briggs directed me across
+a cinder path in one of these cabbage-patches. "See them three 'ouses at
+the bottom of the 'ill? The end one's mine." We approached. No sign of
+the wife. Surely she would be on the look-out for her husband? Also
+there was a sister and a brother-in-law--the latter in a prosperous way
+of business as a grocer near-by: Briggs had told me of them. Would not
+they be watching for him? I began to be anxious. Not once, but several
+times, I had heard of the wounded soldier returning to his home and
+finding no home: both home and wife had gone. (Those are bitterly tragic
+tales, which a realist must write some day.) Still, as we came nearer, I
+saw nobody at the cottage door. "Is th' door open?" asked Briggs. Yes,
+it was open. When we were at the end of the cabbage-patch, and I could
+discern the interior of the cottage parlour (into which the door opened
+direct), it became clear that three persons were there. One of them, a
+man, obviously the brother-in-law, came and peeped out of the window at
+us, and turned and spoke to his companions. Of these two, both women,
+one rose from her chair and the other remained seated. But none of the
+three came to the door.
+
+I have met northern dourness and the inarticulate manner which is such a
+contrast to the gushing and noisy effusion of the south. By a paradox it
+is not inconsistent with the familiar conversationalism to which Briggs
+had treated me, a stranger. But I admit I found Briggs's family circle a
+little embarrassing. They were respectable people: the cottage was neat
+and decently furnished, its occupants were sprucely dressed. I fancy
+they were in their best clothes; certainly their demeanour--and the
+aspect of the table in their midst--denoted a great occasion. This
+table, as I saw when I assisted Briggs up the steps into the room, had
+indeed borne a well-spread tea. No very acute powers of deduction were
+required to decide, from the crumbs on the white cloth and on the
+dishes, that there _had_ been bread and butter and jam and cake. Of
+these not a vestige (except the crumbs) remained. Briggs and I were an
+hour behindhand, and the relatives who awaited the wanderer had eaten
+the banquet laid to welcome him: or so it appeared. I have no doubt that
+all sorts of delicacies were in the cupboard; the kettle on the hob was
+probably on the boil; perhaps buttered toast was in the oven. The fact
+remains that devastation was on the table.
+
+However, Briggs did not see the table, and the table's state occupied me
+only for a fraction of a second. I was more concerned with the three
+people in the parlour and with their reception of my patient. The pale
+woman in the chair by the fire was evidently Briggs's wife. She stared
+at us, as we entered, but said absolutely nothing. Nor did the other and
+slightly younger woman, his sister, say anything. She too stared. And
+the man stared, and said nothing.
+
+"Well, here we are," I announced--an imbecile assertion, but I produced
+it as cheerfully and matter-of-factly as I knew how. I unhooked my arm
+from Briggs's, and made as though to push him forward into the family
+group.
+
+"Nay!" said Briggs. "I mun take my top-coat off first."
+
+I helped him off with his coat. Not one of the three members of his
+family had either moved or spoken--beyond one faint murmur, not an
+actual word, in response to my "Here we are." But Briggs seemed to know
+that his folk were in the room with him, and he neither accosted them,
+expressed any curiosity about them, or betrayed any astonishment at
+their silence.
+
+When he had got his coat off I expected him to move forward into the
+room. A mistake. Mine must be a hasty temperament. They don't do things
+like that in Yorkshire, not even when they have come home blinded from
+the wars. Briggs put out his hand, felt for the cottage door, half
+closed it, felt for a nail on the inner side of it, and carefully hung
+his coat thereon.
+
+_Now_ I could usher him into the waiting family circle.
+
+No. I was wrong.
+
+Briggs calmly divested himself of his jacket. He then felt for another
+door, a door which opened on to a stair leading to the upper storey. On
+a nail in this door he hung his jacket. And then, in his shirt-sleeves,
+he was ready. Shirt-sleeves were symbolical. He was home at last, and
+prepared to sit down with his people.
+
+Of the actual reunion I saw nothing, for I promptly said I must go. It
+was imperative for me to hurry back, or I should miss my train.
+
+"You'll stay an' take a sup of tea with us," said Briggs.
+
+I couldn't, though I should have liked to do so, in some ways, and in
+others should have hardly dared to be an intruder on such a meeting. I
+shook hands with my patient. Looking back as I went out of the door I
+saw Briggs's wife still seated, motionless, in her chair. She had not
+opened her lips. It was impossible to divine what were her emotions. She
+was very pale. There were no tears in her eyes as she stared at her
+young blind husband. But I think there were tears waiting to be shed.
+
+I looked back again when I reached the end of the path across the
+cabbage-patch. The cottage door was still open. In the aperture stood
+the younger of the two women, Briggs's sister. She waved to me and
+smiled. It was evident that it had struck her that I ought to have been
+thanked for my services, and she was expressing this, cordially if
+belatedly. I waved my hand in return, and hastened up the street towards
+the tram.
+
+My hurry was fruitless. I missed my train in Bradford, and stayed the
+night at an hotel, thus (with appropriate but improper extravagance)
+concluding this particular performance in the rôle of travelling courier
+to a distinguished invalid. As I sat over a sumptuous table d'hôte--this
+was long before the submarine blockade and the food restrictions--I
+wondered what Briggs's wife said to Briggs; and I made up a story about
+it. But what I have written above is not a story, it is the unadorned
+truth, which I could not have invented and which is perhaps better than
+the story. In his courier's presence Briggs addressed not one word to
+his wife, and his wife addressed not one word to him; nor did his sister
+or his brother-in-law. Nor did any of this trio address one word to me.
+
+
+PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD., LONDON AND
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+splendid spirit of the British Soldier in them."--_Westminster Gazette._
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+"Simply written, but the intensely human descriptions of the life of the
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+A Budget of Stories and Pictures by Members of the Canadian
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+3s. net. By post 3s. 5d.
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+_Send a copy to a friend in Canada._
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+aims, but for its own intrinsic worth. A book which will be talked about
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+"Very funny in a very original way."--_The World._
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+_To be had from all Booksellers._
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+       *       *       *       *       *
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+SIMPKIN, MARSHALL HAMILTON, KENT & CO., LTD.
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+
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+
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+Transcriber's note: Spelling and punctuation have been normalized.
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