OBSERVATIONS S5 ORDERLY
WARD MUIR
OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
No'vels by the Author of " Obser'vations
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 Hospilal
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 191 7
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 acknow-
ledgments to their editors.
The coloured design on the paper wrapper is
by Sergeant Noel Irving, R.A.M.C. (T.), a
member of the unit at the 3rd London
General Hospital.
CONTENTS
PAGE
My First Day .... 19
II
Life in the Orderlies' Huts , 33
III
Washing-up ..... 51
IV
A " Hut " Hospital ... 65
13
14 CONTENTS
V
FAGB
From the " D Block " Wards . 79
VI
When the Wounded Arrive . 93
VII
1 . . . • J\ ..... . • -LOy
VIII
Laundry Problems . . .121
IX
On Buttons ..... 137
X
A Word about " Slackers in
Khaki " 147
CONTENTS 15
XI
PAGE
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
MY FIRST DAY
MY FIRST DAY
The sergeant in chai-ge 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. Im-
possible, 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
19
20 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
khaki. The escape from civiHan 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. What-
ever 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
MY FIRST DAY 21
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
22 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
the masks-for-facial-disfigurements scheme
which gained him his commission and which
has attracted world-wide notice from ex-
perts. 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 en-
shrines cleaning appliances, the taps of
which, if you turn them on without precau-
tions, treat you to an involuntary shower
bath. The sink-room contains a selection
of utensils wherewith every orderly becomes
only too famihar : their correct employ-
ment, a theme of many of the mildly Rabe-
laisian 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
ritu9.1s which need not h^re be 4welt on,
MY FIRST DAY 23
(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 help-
ing 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 sHd 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 orderHesque impres-
sion in those tweeds. '* Better take your
jacket off," sighed Mrs. Mappin. I did so,
chose a dishcloth, and started tg dry a
24 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 repre-
hensible. 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 fooHsh enough to exact from her a
strict obedience to the letter of the law in
discipUne. Mrs. Mappin, in her non- tea-
bibbing interludes, toiled like a galley-
slave, was rigidly punctual, and never com-
plained. 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-tem-
MY FIRST DAY 25
pered 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
Httle 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'
26 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 per-
haps 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 — re-
membering 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 pon-
derous impedimenta of a juvenile second
lieutenant who was bidding the hospital
farewell, and whose trunks contained — at
a guess — geological specimens and battle-
field souvenirs in the shape of "dud"
German shells. This young gentleman
MY FIRST DAY 27
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, de-
positing 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 mis-
takes — likewise the first inkling of a pro-
found 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 fieetness of
foot. I flew. So did the time. Almost
28 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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- an d-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 gargon, pouring out
drinks — with concealed envy — placing and
MY FIRST DAY 29
removing plates, handing salt, bread, ser-
viettes. . . . After which, back to Mrs.
Mappin and her renewed mountain of once-
more-to-be-washed- an d-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 assist-
ance, 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."
30 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
" 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
31
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 metalHc sides and roofs. The
shimmering foHage 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 sound-
ing parade had dragged us from warm
beds ; or in an afternoon thaw after snow,
3 33
34 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
when the corrugated eaves wept torrents
in the twihght, and one's feet (despite the
excellence of army boots) were chilled by
their wadings through slush. Mea.nwhile,
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 com-
fortable 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 Ser-
geant-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
LIFE IN THE ORDERLIES' HUTS 35
and our uprisings in Hut 6. There might
have been an even number, twenty- two,
but one bed's place was monopoHsed 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 sym-
metrical 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 hue — unless you
count an alarm-clock, bought by public
subscription, and notable for a tuck of
tinkling faintly, as though wanting to
strike but failing, in the watches of the
night, hours before its appointed minute
36 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 dayHght 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
LIFE IN THE ORDERLIES' HUTS 37
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 Ofiicer,
as he went down the aisle, were audible to
all. Stifily 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 de-
cadent and civilian as a book — and cer-
tainly nothing so unsightly as a jam jar
— must be visible on your barrack-room
38 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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
f oldable. 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 bottons peep-
ing 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
LIFE IN THE ORDERLIES' HUTS 39
persons who had unsound ideas on the
subject of compact storage.
The second series of folderies to which
the novice was initiated concerned them-
selves 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 mo-
ment the Reveille uplifted you from your
couch, that couch had to be made ship-
shape according to rule. No finicky " air-
ing " ! 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 hang-
ing 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 parallelo-
gram, viewed from the aisle, must show
no blanket edges, only curves of the
40 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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
LIFE IN THE ORDERLIES' HUTS 41
series of pairs of triangles all ending at
exactly the same spot in each bedstead.
These trifles reveal at a glance the pro-
fessional 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 con-
tribute 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 news-
papers which they had meant to read.
Desultory conversation enlivened those
corners where the denizens of the hut were
42 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 brush-
ing-up the metal buttons of their walking-
out tunics (otherwise known as their Square
Push Suits). The buttons of their work-
ing tunics had of course been burnished
before parade. The correct employment
of button-sticks and of the magic cleaner
called Soldier's Friend ; the poHshing 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
LIFE IN THE ORDERLIES' HUTS 43
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 Ward-
master, whose duty it was to make the
round of the orderHes' 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
44 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
Wardmaster always departed in the long
run. . . . And then uprose, between bed
and bed, those unconclusive debates in
which the masculine soul dehghteth : Theo-
logy ; 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 War 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
LIFE IN THE ORDERLIES' HUTS 45
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. Some-
times 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
rolUng 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 bhssful innocence ; at six he
would be on parade, as correctly attired
as you were j^ourself, 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 finish-
46 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
ing 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 Reveille.
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
LIFE IN THE ORDERLIES' HUTS 47
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 seance, " 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
geniaUty and garrulousness to twenty-one
sinners.
Ill
WASHING-UP
49
Ill
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
51
52 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
di'eadful 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 wiUingly. 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
WASHING-UP 53
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 occasion-
ally 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 pud-
ding-basin. This pair are hateful beyond
54 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 compart-
ments to hold meat, vegetables and
duif. 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 woula
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
WASHING-UP 55
the orderly of the ward with a corre-
sponding 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 con-
cerning " specials " (separate diets ordered
for patients requiring delicacies). Some-
times 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 de-
partment. There were moments, never-
theless, 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,
56 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
if she had, that it was of any conse-
quence.
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
WASHING-UP 57
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 en-
dured ; 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 " jDry 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-
poHsh, one box of matches, bath-brick,
soft soap, and — soda. It is an extra-
ordinary chemical, soda. Before I became
a ward orderly I had no idea of the remark-
able properties of soda. A handful of soda
in boiUng water, and behold the grease dis-
solve 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.
58 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
Alas, the supply of soda considered suffi-
cient by the I3ry Store authorities never
lasted beyond \\'ednesday. 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
WASHING-UP 59
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 com-
pared 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 sand-
paper.
I need scarcely say that sandpaper was
not suppHed 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 pud-
ding-basins would be an insupportable
prospect without sandpaper, I laid in a
stock of sandpaper, paying for the same out
6o OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 Hft
illegitimately, so to speak, I added to the
smuggling-in of sandpaper a secret pur-
chase of soda. Except that our scrub-
ladies, each and all, discovering that the
Pry Store's allowance of this priceless
chemical had at last apparently been
generous, caused it to fly at a dis-
concerting pace, and as a result some-
times 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 un-
WASHING-UP 6i
dismayed. 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
63
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 \\B.t Office was held back from
doing if it wanted to do it. Perhaps the
least hkely 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
5 ^5
66 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 introduc-
tion of numerous bathrooms and lava-
tories (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 prob-
lems, the mere fringe of the subject, had
never occurred to our patriot. His idea of
a hospital was a place where soldiers lie in
A "HUT" HOSPITAL 67
bed and get well. (WTiat queer notions
visitors absorb of the easiness of hospital
Hfe !) He had not glimpsed the organisa-
tion which made the cure possible. The man
in bed, a Sister hovering in the back-
ground 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 build-
ings 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 prepara-
68 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
tions 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 insignifi-
cance compared with the interests of the
safety of the commonwealth. Some concep-
tion of the promptness with which this
paper scheme of Sir Alfred Keogh's ma-
terialised 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 hos-
pital 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
A "HUT" HOSPITAL 69
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 build-
ing 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 in-
stitution'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 , cook-
house, operating-theatre, pathological
laboratory, linen-store, steward's store,
clothing-store, detention-room, administra-
tion 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 ba-
ronial style of architecture beloved by mid-
70 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 sil-
houette of its grey stone f agade, 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
fagade, and is much too " ugly " and
utilitarian for postcard immortalisation.
The best part of our hospital — the hos-
pital, 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, doubt-
fully weather-proof and probably scamped
by profiteering contractors. Of the huts
provided at certain training centres this
may have been true. The finely austere
<r
HUT" HOSPITAL 71
and efficient ranks of hut-wards which con-
stitute 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 work-
men, carpenters, engineers, drainage specia-
lists, 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
72 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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. Ap-
proaching 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. Launch-
ing 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.
A "HUT" HOSPITAL 73
It consumes ajbig 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, galvan-
ised-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 Cor-
ridor, 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
74 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
room, massage department, etc., and their
stepless exit into the open air.
Looked at from outside, a hut-ward is —
to the aesthetic eye — a hideous structure.
Knowing what it stands for, the science, the
tenderness and the fundamental civiHsation
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 belong-
ings. (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 poHsh-
ings. 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 Ut,
A "HUT" HOSPITAL 75
but also airy and odourless. When all the
windows are open (which is the case through-
out the entire summer and generally the
case in winter also) the patient has the
advantages of indoor comfort plus an out-
door atmosphere. At the end of the ward
a covered verandah is spacious enough to
take an extra couple of beds for those re-
quiring completely open-air treatment.
The ward proper has certain additions :
a kitchen with gas-stove and geyser ; a
sink-room with geyser and cleansing appara-
tus 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 orna-
76 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
mentation, but as he lies in bed and con-
templates that unadorned ceiling he is
a deal better off than if he were gazing at
the elaborate (and dust-harbouring) cor-
nices of the So-and-So Club's grandiose
smoking-lounge in Pall Mall.
FROM THE "D" BLOCK WARDS
77
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 stal-
warts who have mustered from the *' D "
Block wards.
79
8o OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
" 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 twink-
ling 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 cor-
ridor. 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 en-
countered, 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
FROM THE '' D " BLOCK WARDS 8i
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 pro-
menading party of our blind patients. It
is the plain truth, nevertheless, that the
blind men themselves are far from melan-
choly. 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 ex-
planation. I simply state the fact. I will
fortify it by an anecdote.
It came to pass that eight compHmentary
tickets for a Queen's Hall matinee were
received by the Matron, who in due course
allotted them to seven " D " Block patients.
An orderly, detailed to take them to the
6
82 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
hall, completed the octette. Corporal Smith,
the orderly in question, recounted his adven-
tures afterwards. ** Never again," quoth
he, " shall I jump at a matinee job if there
are bhnd 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 tor losing themselves,
entering wrong trains, and generally escap-
ing—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.
FROM THE " D " BLOCK WARDS 83
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 — dis-
tinguished himself by facetiae (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 con-
sented.
He had forgotten that at Oxford Circus
station the lifts have been abolished infavour
of sliding staircases . Confronted by the esca-
lator, Corporal Smith halted his party and
84 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
informed them that they must walk down by
the ordinary stair. The escalator was not
safe for bhnd 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 in-
exorably lowered them into the bowels of
FROM THE *' D " BLOCK WARDS 85
the earth he realised, only too vividly, what
might happen at the foot of the descent.
The evening rush of suburb-bound pas-
sengers 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, hope-
lessly 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 pro-
claimed aloud that this was funnier even
than England's pronunciation of the word
86 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
* 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 dis-
comfited. Jock's comments routed her
more effectively than the Corporal's assur-
FROM THE " D " BLOCK WARDS 87
ance 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 plat-
form.
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 C071. 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."
88 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 re-
pentant, 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
FROM THE " D " BLOCK WARDS 89
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
91
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 distribu-
tions. 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
93
94 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
these times, could be empty !) But our
patients have only a short acquaintance-
ship 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
WHEN THE WOUNDED ARRIVE 95
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 neces-
sity. Whereas there ze^as 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
(i) 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 dress-
ing-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,"
96 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 Self ridge'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 2 J a. 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 ; Sur-
name ; Christian Name ; Age ; Length of
Service ; Completed Months with Field
Force ; Diseases (wounds and injuries are
WHEN THE WOUNDED ARRIVE 97
expressed by a number indicating their
nature and whereabouts) ; Date of Ad-
mission ; Date of Discharge or Transfer ;
Number of Days under Treatment; Number
of Ward ; ReHgion ; 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 state-
ments 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 tern.,
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
7
98 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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. Fumi-
gator- 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 am-
bulances with the cot-cases begin to appear.
Now is the orderlies' busy time. Each
stretcher must be quickly but gently re-
moved 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
WHEN THE WOUNDED ARRIVE 99
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 pro-
ceed, with their burden, up the aisle be-
tween 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 ex-
ceptionally 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,
100 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
as I say, they seldom come to England
without having been treated previously
at a base abroad (except during the
periods of heavy lighting). 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 actuali-
ties 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
WHEN THE WOUNDED ARRIVE loi
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 appro-
priate to such an assemblage.
The stretcher-case, before he is taken
to his ward, must also " give his parti-
culars," must also be interviewed by the
Pack Store officials, and must also have
assigned to him his blue uniform (where-
with 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 filHng-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,
102 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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, with-
out 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
WHEN THE WOUNDED ARRIVE 103
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 orderHes 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'etre of our
great war-hospital.
VII
ti
T A . "
•A- • • • • xX • • • • 4
105
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 photo-
graphs) 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 resent-
107
io8 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
ment that I hear him thus classified as a
mere type. He is not a type. DiscipUne
and training have given him some veneer
of generahsed 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 civihans 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 unfaihng
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 civihans
who merely happen to have adopted a
certain garb for the performance of a certain
" T . . . . A . . . . '* 109
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 photo-
graphy ; 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 para-
graph. Neither his picture nor the para-
graph may be positively a lie, and yet, when
the arm-chair dweller chucklingly draws
attention to them, I am tempted to relapse
no OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 assert-
ing 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
J. , . . , A , , . . Ill
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 generalisa-
tions 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
112 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 subter-
ranean 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 inca-
pacitated for an active career in the future;
and he was neither illiterate nor unin-
telligent. 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 tro-
glodyte trade extorted from me a more
enthusiastic sympathy than might be sup-
posed possible.
That agreeable domestic pet, homo sapiens,
remains unchanged even when you dress
1 .... A ... . 113
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 mo-
ment 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 squabbhng about
sectarian dogmas or gambhng 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.
8
114 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
(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 com-
plaining 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 dis-
satisfied (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 desir-
((
i .... A. ... . ^-^5
ability 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 f romreturning 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 matinee 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
ii6 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 ir-
resolute. 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 play-
wright 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 un-
animous mood — unanimously condemning
cant and at the same time unanimously
courteous. Now that I come to reflect I be-
lieve 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
" T .... A .... " 117
out of season is about as sensible as to expect
him perpetually to live up to the photo-
graphs 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 habita-
tion ?
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 authorit}^ who has interviewed many
thousands of convalescents, further re-
marked : " The wounded man who has been
under shell fire and who professes to be
ii8 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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." j
VIII
LAUNDRY PROBLEMS
119
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 traffick-
ing with pillow-cases, sheets, counterpanes
and tablecloths. In the reckoning of
121
122 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
these he is apt to make mistakes and to
lapse into a casualness which, in a woman
famiHar with household routine, would be
improbable. " Sister's " sharpest reproofs
were called forth by errors made in connec-
tion 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, pail-
lasse-cases, and the like : for example, there
are " barrack " bolster-cases and " hos-
pital " 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 ap-
peared to be latent in that noun ; for, in
addition to the ten unqualified "Cases"
there are seven more, defined as " Cases,
LAUNDRY PROBLEMS 123
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?) Counter-
panes 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
124 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
Department on each of those days, it is
clear that exactitude in the filHng-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 pre-
viously 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 ul-
timately 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 for-
tunate.)
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 trans-
portation at a rapid pace. Twenty sheets
are usually but a part of the bundle ; and
twenty sheets are alone no light burden.
LAUNDRY PROBLEMS 125
Between his teeth — both his hands being
occupied with the balancing of the bundle —
he carries his chit : that indispensable Hst.
Arrived at the store he dumps the bundle
on the ground, opens it, and pitches its con-
tents piecemeal over a counter to one of
the staif 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 Hst and keeping
an eye on what he is receiving. For we
may, by guile, palm oif 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 hst has to be achieved
at a high speed and in the midst of a babel ;
126 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 in-
frequent 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 mar-
vellous 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.
LAUNDRY PROBLEMS 127
" 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 — 3. 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 reasonable-
ness was undoubtedly the note to strike
when such a contretemps occurred.
Jrlaving got quit of the last item in your
128 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 depart-
ment 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 other-
wise, had guaranteed its accuracy by in-
itialing it. Accordingly, in the Clean Linen
Store, a fresh bundle was ready for your
acceptance, its contents consisting of du-
plicates 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 thatyou 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
LAUNDRY PROBLEMS 129
of fellow-orderlies similarly employed) run
through the whole of its contents, comput-
ing 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
9
130 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
from so temerarious an adventure. Some-
how 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 pro-
blem 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
LAUNDRY PROBLEMS 131
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 " after-
noon 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 in-
vestigated the cupboard, counting all the
pillow-cases. We three each arrived ac
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
132 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 mmivais quart d'heure.
LAUNDRY PROBLEMS 133
It was a suitable penalty for her cross-
ness. 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
135
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 mili-
tary 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
symbohc 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 enHsted I felt a similar irrita-
tion 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
137
138 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 furbish-
ing 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
ON BUTTONS 139
whose job hardly gives him a moment for
meals — let alone for dalliance with the fair
— I cannot pretend to fathom. It is argu-
able 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)
live 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 but-
tons 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
brilHant. 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
140 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
off-duty rest-hour in rubbing metal buttons
which would have been every bit as button-
able 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 : (i)
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 instruc-
tions — " 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
ON BUTTONS 141
were very particular you finished the per-
formance 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 com-
plications. 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 like-
wise 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
142 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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,
ON BUTTONS 143
more than one day. " Bluebell," " Silvo,"
and the other chemico-frictional prepara-
tions in favour of which I ultimately
abandoned Soldier's Friend, are aUke 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
gratituderto 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 com-
pletely 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"
10 145
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 orderHes. 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 alwaj^s
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
M7
148 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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
enHstment 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 twiddhng our thumbs in some kind of
cosy club-room situated in the neighbour-
hood 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 other-
wise. 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
ABOUT " SLACKERS IN KHAKI " 149
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 tele-
phone 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 troUies
in the corridors, some have been shovelling
coke, some have been toiling in the cook-
house or stores, some have been shifting
loads of bedding to the fumigator, some
have been on " sanitary fatigue," some
have been cleaning windows or whitewash-
ing 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
150 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
dread announcement, " All passes stopped."
The luckless wight whose one afternoon -
ol^ 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." — Regi-
mental Military Policeman) that the passes
have been countermanded. Until the con-
voy 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 mis-
understandings this " All passes stopped "
law has given rise to, one shudders to guess.
But indeed no war-hospital orderly ever
arranges an}^ 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 appro-
priate 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
ABOUT " SLACKERS IN KHAKI " 151
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 court-
ship. And he must respond, instanter, or
he will find that he has earned the C.B. —
which in this instance means not Com-
panion 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
152 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
not, as a matter of fact, able-bodied, even
though muscular enough to stand this
short physical effort. Excitable old gentle-
men 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
ABOUT " SLACKERS IN KHAKI " 153
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 else-
where, 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
154 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 un-
picturesque. 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 ex-
ABOUT " SLACKERS IN KHAKI " 155
ceeded 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 thirst-
ing 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 fiUing-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 inter-
156 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
preted 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 orderhes have, by
some questionable manoeuvre, dodged the
fiery ordeal of which this string of slow-
moving stretchers is the harvest.
XI
THE RECREATION ROOMS
157
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 estabhsh-
ments. 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 biUiard tables, a library, and current
newspapers, British and Colonial. This
room is the scene of whist-drives, billiard
and pool tournaments, and other sociable
159
i6o OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
ongoings. Sometimes there is an exhibi-
tion match on the best bilhard 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 hos-
pital began to function in 1914, constitute
the outstandmg feature of the " good
time" enjoyed by 3rd Londoners. The
" Old Rec." and its crowded concerts will
THE RECREATION ROOMS i6i
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 pur-
poses 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 dis-
charged from hospital. Instead of idhng
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
II
i62 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
afternoon, where he can make as much
noise as he hkes 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
be conceived! — of upwards of 300 beds.
THE RECREATION ROOMS 163
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 ad-
vance. The recreation rooms are a pay-
ing 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, musi-
cians, actors and actresses have come and
given of their best. Miss Hullah's Music
in War Time Committee (that dehghtful
body), and Mr. Howard Wilhams's parties,
are perhaps our greatest regular standbys.
i64 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 box-
ing 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
fiat. A curious Empire reputation, this of
Mr. WilUams !
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-con-
trolling constables. That their comic songs
were accompanied by a faultless orchestra
was understandable enough. One can be-
lieve 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 RECREATION ROOMS 165
the huge red indiarubber-flexible mouth
who sings " Under the archway, Archi-
bald," and follows this amorous ditty with
a clog dance is — in his washed moments —
the terror of burglars, requires unthink-
able flights of imagination. As I gazed
at this singular resurrection of Moore and
Burgess and breathless childhood's after-
noons 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 con-
vention 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, Bime-
talHsm : hosts of forgotten images,
i66 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
names and shibboleths came popping out
from the brain's dusty pigeon-holes, magic-
ally 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 con-
sisted 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 ofhcer patients ; here and there an
THE RECREATION ROOMS 167
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 hap-
hazard audience, this, of anybody and
everj^body who chooses to pay at a turn-
stile ! 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, Ser-
geants, 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
i68 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
" 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 roles 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' parti-
THE RFXREATION ROOMS 169
culars. 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 httle 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 my-
self 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 be-
fore 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 J awns' n. ... No doubts assailed
his mind as to whether it was right to
170 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
" 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
X71
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
173
174 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
his legs projecting across the flagstones.
The women had, in fact, discovered him
by tripping over those legs in the dark-
ness.
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 indis-
position 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 COCKNEY 175
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.
176 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 II 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 pubhc houses are shut, our coffee-
stalls are able to sell two brownish bever-
ages, called respectively coffee and tea,
which otherwise could hardly hope to
achieve the honour of human consumption.
THE COCKNEY 177
Fate has guided me on many midnight
pilgrimages through the town, and I have
imbibed, sometimes with rehsh, the hquids
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 silver-
smiths and might be priced at threepence.
12;
178 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 re-
marks.
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
THE COCKNEY 179
rank when the front vehicle is hailed. This
special specimen of his breed appeared to
be a satelhte 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 every-
thing 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 (instan-
taneously 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'tfdone you no 'arm."
"No '
e 5
lin't.
>)
" Yus
'e
'as:''
1
"No
'e
'ain'
t
arm."
i8o OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
" Yus 'e 'as/' was the soldier's surprising
retort.
'E ain't done you no
To which the derehct 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, whim-
pering 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, peer-
ing 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,
" or Bert it is ! "
THE COCKNEY i8i
" Knew you in two ticks," grunted Bert.
" Same ol' 'Arry." (This was the derehct.)
"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 pre-
viously. 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 recog-
nised 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 ser-
vices, 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
i82 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 curUng
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
THE COCKNEY 183
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 meet-
ings at the hospital gate, which are not
lacking in pathos, have sometimes mani-
fested 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
i84 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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
THE COCKNEY 185
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 impartialit}^ 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," how-
ever, 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 re-
covered from his operation to get about on
i86 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
crutches he was the wag of the ward. He
took a special dehght 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 over-
done snoring, at the finish, which gave
THE COCKNEY 187
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 earty 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
i86 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
crutches he was the wag of the ward. He
took a special dehght 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 over-
done snoring, at the finish, wliich gave
THE COCKNEY 187
birth to suspicions and caused the trick to
be detected.
The night nui-ses do not have a placid
time of it if their patients are at the stage
of recovery when spirits begin to rise and
the earty 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
igo OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
List ' mean ? Does it mean that it's
dangerous to go near them ? " Now in
Ward C22 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 under-
takers, 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
THE COCKNEY 191
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 clergy-
man. (" 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 an-
nounced, " 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 01' 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
192 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 starthng) and that for
some reason she and " Sister " did not
quite hit it off, " had words," and subse-
quently 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
THE COCKNEY 193
blouse) sat beside him, hour after hour,
while little Bill, the child, towed a cheap
wooden engine up and down the grass
patch, obhvious 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
shces 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
13
194 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
true tenderness ; and Bill's wife be-
came one of Sister's most enthusiastic
adorers.
It came to pass, after a week of pitiful
anxiety, that the Medical Officer pro-
nounced 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. " Wen 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 : slie 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 over-
heard another of Bill's grim pleasantries.
He was explaining to madame that
they must apprentice their offspring to
the engineering trade. *' I wanter mike
THE COCKNEY 195
Lir 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 be-
come 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 am-
putated leg, whether it had got a tomb-
stone, 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
196 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 in-
truded, 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 hked
THE COCKNEY 197
to have cockneys in their wards. With-
out 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
199
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
20I
202 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
to stand hard wear and tear on the high-
roads ; and my army boots, after two
years, have not yet needed re-soHng. I
wore them, it is true, during my period
of service with the Chain Gang, as a squad
of outdoor orderhes, 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 offici-
ally-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 live 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 orderhes 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
THE STATION PARTY 203
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
204 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 shop-
man, would not have been inappropriate
during certain periods of crisis.
From time to time our tasks were in-
terrupted 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 unwel-
come. Lined up on the parade ground
we were put in charge of a corporal.
" Party, 'shun ! Right turn! Quick
THE STATION PARTY 205
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 ! " Cigar-
ettes 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 j oys 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 1 . . . Eyes front ! Party,
march at ease ! " The cigarettes reap-
peared, the song was resumed. Approach-
ing the station, "Party, 'shun I '' Cigar-
ettes were thrown awav. 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
2o6 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 justifica-
tion) 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 hap-
pened — ^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 carry-
ing stretchers up the stairs from the station
THE STATION PARTY 207
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 liveUer 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 patter-
ing 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 role
which truly merits the country's admira-
tion. While carrying on the commerce
of the Empire — ^that vital commerce with-
out which there would be bankruptcy
2o8 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 Miseri-
cordia 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 humi-
Uating exhibition of the siUiness of
masculine human nature. Members of our
station-party who had enUsted but a week
back, and who knew nothing whatever of
THE STATION PARTY 209
their work, would, in a whisper, mock the
Bluebottles — although every Bluebottle had
taken first-aid classes and passed examina-
tions at which most of the mockers would
have boggled. The Bluebottles were
"civilians" . . . there you have it. We
— ^who would probably never do any battle-
field 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 perform-
ance 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 starvehngs
and required our Herculean aid to lift
the stretchers up the stairs, was palpably
nonsense. Still we told ourselves that
we, as discipHned soldiers, were here to
give a hand to a civilian mob who might
otherwise faint and fail. A singular de-
lusion ! Time has proved its falsity, for
with the issue of fresh orders our station-
parties ceased to function : the Bluebottles
14
210 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
now make shift without us — and without,
as far as I know, any mishap.
The hospital train was eventually sig-
nalled. 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 plat-
form 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
THE STATION PARTY 211
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 assist-
ance : 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 pro-
cess of being bathed at the hospital before
the last stretcher-case was quit of the
train. The stretcher cases were our con-
cern. Pairs of Bluebottles, each carrying
a stretcher, entered the van- wards and
212 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 plat-
form 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
THE STATION PARTY 213
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 out-
side, 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 gang-
ways 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
214 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 naive
Qiy. 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, Hfting wild and un-
shaven 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
THE STATION PARTY 215
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 unostenta-
tiously into our ranks. Then, " Party,
2i6 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
'shun ! Left turn ! Right incline — quick
maxch ! " 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 relin-
quishment of m}^ seldom-worn and there-
fore none too friendly marching-boots.
XIV
SLANG IN A WAR HOSPITAL
217
XIV
SLANG IN A WAR HOSPITAL
Every ward in the hospital has a bath-
room 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
melee 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
219
220 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 disturb-
ance of bandages. No one who has fre-
quented 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 monop-
olises 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 hap-
pens 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
SLANG IN A WAR HOSPITAL 221
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 inspec-
tions, about the imminent arrival of im-
possibly large convoys, about news — re-
ceived 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
222 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
the bazaars) ; here it is, naturally, a bath-
room 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
suiferings. " 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 din-
kum, this trip." ("Square dinkum" or
** dinkum " is an Antipodean verbal flourish.
SLANG IN A WAR HOSPITAL 223
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, Hmited 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 deriva-
tions 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 record-
ing. 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 dis-
224 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
covered 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 silHest 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 pene-
trated 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
SLANG IN A WAR HOSPITAL 225
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 triviahty 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 extra-
ordinarily common in the army, so common
that it is used with complete unconscious-
ness 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'etre of
this pseudo-poetic mania I do not know,
but I suspect that it originated, in the
15
226 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 tempta-
tion. 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
SLANG IN A WAR HOSPITAL 227
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 accommoda-
tion, 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
228 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
been telling a far-fetched story : he has
been " chancmg 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).
SLANG IN A WAR HOSPITAL 229
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 pio-
neer 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 present-
able ; " gone west," died (also applied to
things broken, e.g. a broken pipe has
"gone west"); " oojah," anything (simi-
lar to thingummy or what-d'ye-c all-it) ;
" push," " pusher," or " square push,"
a girl (hence " square-push tunic," the
" swagger " tunic for walking-out occa-
230 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
sions). The words for drunkenness are in-
numerable — ** 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 oif." 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
SLANG IN A WAR HOSPITAL 231
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 pro-
fessors, 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 in-
fluenced: 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
232 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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
233
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 sleep-
ing-cars de luxe. Anon we were crossing
the Atlantic or loUing 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 j^et, in a
235
2^6 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
o
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 distin-
guished, if far from affluent, invahds.
They ought, at least, to rank as distin-
guished ; for the reason they needed a
courier was because they had given their
health, or hmbs, 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. Gener-
ally the trip is a short one, to some out-
lying suburb of London or to some town
or village in the home counties ; but some-
times my flights have been further afield,
to Ireland, or Wales ; and once I went to
Yorkshire with a bHnd 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
A BLIND MAN'S HOME-COMING 237
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 un-
fortunately 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 distin-
guished 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 supphed 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 encoun-
tered Briggs before that moment. I beheld
238 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 nothing-
ness. 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 expression-
lessness that overlaid and strangely neu-
tralised its grins and its laughter.
Bhnd 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
A BLIND MAN'S HOME-COMING 239
seven months before and to whom I was
now leading him back — his wife.
Briggs, a civiUan 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 govern-
ment-contract tailoring, to suit all our
discharges. His overcoat, which might
have been called a Chesterfield in Shore-
ditch, 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
240 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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. Were 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
detour. 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
A BLIND MAN'S HOME-COMING 241
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 sur-
mised 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 other-
wise 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 al-
together.
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
16
242 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 im-
parted 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 par-
ticularly surprised, nor, what was more im-
portant, 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
A BLIND MAN'S HOME-COMING 243
boarded it. " Tha mun pay thrippence
only, mind," he warned me when the con-
ductor 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 pahngs ; 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 metho-
dist 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 squaHd 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
244 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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
A BLIND MAN'S HOME-COMING 245
at us, and turned and spoke to his com-
panions. 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 famihar conversationaUsm to
which Briggs had treated me, a stranger.
But I admit I found Briggs' s family circle
a little embarrassing. They were respect-
able people : the cottage was neat and
decently furnished, its occupants were
sprucely dressed. I fancy they were in
their best clothes ; certainly their de-
meanour — 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.
246 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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 con-
cerned 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 sHghtly 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.
A BLIND MAN'S HOME-COMING 247
(C
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, ex-
pressed 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 tempera-
ment. They don't do things like that in
Yorkshire, not even when they have come
home bhnded 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
248 OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
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
A BLIND MAN'S HOME-COMING 249
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 belatedl}^ 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 role of
travelling courier to a distinguished in-
valid. As I sat over a sumptuous table
d'hote — ^this was long before the submarine
blockade and the food restrictions — ^I won-
dered 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.
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