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 turntheir 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 thehall, 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 manœuvring 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 gavehimthe 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 andinformed 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 ofthe 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'scon.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 factthat they arenotsad. 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.
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, inthese 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 lieon. 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 butin.
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 periodof 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 therewasan 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 theAdmission 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 areexpressed 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) hisown 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 sergeantpromptly 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 gaywallopwhich 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 inevitablecocoa (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 bedjust 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 theraison d'êtreof our great war-hospital.
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 certainjob—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 ofJohn Bulland theEvening News, and I have had pacifists (they seemed to have fought no less bravely) who, week by week, read and approved Mr. Snowden in theLabour 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 relapseinto irreverence and utter one or other (or perhaps both) of two phrases which T. Atkins is himself credited with usingad nauseam—"Na-poo" and "Idon'tthink."
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 behindcounters, 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 whichcansafely 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 jobisfinished 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 mostroseate 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 dresshim 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, butthesebroken 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 ishomo sapiensof 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 spontaneousshout 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 Atkinsisunanimous. Whether he lives up to them or not (and to expect him unflinchingly to live up to them in season andout 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 theydidwant 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 beeager 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."
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 ofthese 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, theCheck 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 LinenDepartment 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 yourbundle, 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 crowdof 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 refrainedfrom 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 CleanLinen 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 hisfinger 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 amauvais 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, theCheck Book for Hospital Linen.
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 donot 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. Atkinswhose 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 hisoff-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 youwere 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 toexpectorating 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.
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; hepictured 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 werenotarriving, 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 sectionsto 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, thedread 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 nearlyas sure as the sun's rising. The hospital orderly isnever—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 arenot, 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 wascomposed 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 doanythingin 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, Egyptand 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 therearepeople 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 manœuvre, dodged the fiery ordeal of which this string of slow-moving stretchers is the harvest.