 CHAPTER 1 MY FIRST DAY The sergeant in charge of the clothing store was curt. He couldn't help it. He had run short of tunics, also of pants, except three pairs which wouldn't fit me, wouldn't fit anybody, unless we enlisted three very fat dwarfs. He had kept on asking for tunics and pants, and they had 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 of blessed clothes which never came. Impossible, anyhow, to wring me out. I was going on duty, was I? That I must go on duty in my cities. It was a disappointment. Your new recruit feels that no small item of his reward is a privilege of beholding himself in khaki. The escape from civilian clothes was, at that era, one of the prime lures to enlistment. I had attempted to escape before and failed. Now at last I had found a branch of the army which would accept me. It needed my services instantly. I was to start work at once. Nothing better. I was ready. This was what I had been seeking for months past. But I confess it, I had always pictured myself dressed as a soldier. The postponement of this bright vision for even twenty-four hours, now that it had seemed to be within my grasp, was damping. However, the sergeant-major had told me that I was to go on duty as orderly in Ward W, an officer's ward, at two p.m., prompt. I did not know where Ward W was, and did not know what a ward orderly's functions should amount to. And I had no uniform. I was attired in a light gray lounge suit, appropriate enough to my normal habit, but quite too flippant I was certain for a ward orderly. Whatever else a ward orderly might be, I was sure that he was not the sort of person to sport a gray lounge suit. Still, I must hide me to Ward W. I had got my wish. I was in the army at last. In the army one does not argue, one obeys. So, having been directed down an interminable corridor, I resented myself at Ward W. On entry I had not, but no response awarded 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 not aware of it at the time. Private Wood, who was not too proud to wash dishes, which was what he had at the moment been doing, is a distinguished sculptor and a man of keen imagination. At a subsequent period that imagination was to bring forth the Mass for Facial Disfigurements scheme which gained him his commission, and which has attracted worldwide notice from experts. Meanwhile his imagination enabled him to understand the exact extent of an office's ignorance. The precise details which I did not know and must know. The essential apparatus I had been shown the knack of before he fled to catch his train. He devoted just five minutes, no more, to teaching me how to be award-orderly. Four of those minutes were lavished on the sink room, a small apartment that enshrines cleaning appliances, the taps of which, if you turn them on without precautions, treat you to an involuntary shower-bath. The sink room contains a selection of utensils where with every orderly becomes only too familiar. Their correct employment, a theme of many of the mildly, rabolazian jest, which are current in every hospital, is a mystery. Until some kind mentor, like Private Wood, lifts the veil. In four minutes he had told me all about the sink room and all about all the gear in the sink room and all about a variety of rituals which need not here be dwelt on. The sink room is an excellent place in which to receive a private lecture. The fifth minute was spent in introducing me in another room, the Ward Kitchen, to Mrs. Mappin, the Scrub Lady. A scrub lady is attached to each ward and most wards, it shouldn't justice be added, are attached to their scrub ladies. Certainly I was to find that Ward W was attached to Mrs. Mappin. Mrs. Mappin was washing up. Private Wood had been helping her. The completion of his task he delegated to me. Mrs. Mappin, this is our new orderly, he'll help me finish the lunch dishes. Private Wood then slid into his tunic, snatched his cap from a nail in the wall and vanished. Mrs. Mappin surveyed me. Ah, she sighed. She was given a sign. He's a goodon, is Private Wood. The inference was plain. There was little hope of mine becoming such a goodon. In any case, my nady grey tweeds were against me. One could never make an orderly ask impression in those tweeds. Better take your jacket off, said Mrs. Mappin. I did so, chose a dishcloth and started to dry a pyramid in what plates. First base Mrs. Mappin meditated, her hands in soapy water. Then she withdrew them. I think, she sighed, you and me could do with a cup of tea. And presently I was having tea with Mrs. Mappin. I was afterwards to learn that this practice of calling a halt in her labours for a cup of tea was a highly incorrect one on Mrs. Mappin's part, and that my share in the transaction was to the last degree reprehensible. But I was also to learn that faithful, selfless, honest and diligent scrub ladies are none too common, and the sister who discovers that she has been allotted such a jewel as Mrs. Mappin is seldom foolish enough to exact from her strict obedience to the letter of the law in discipline. Mrs. Mappin and her non-tea, vibing interludes, toiled like a galley slave, was rigidly punctual and never complained. Her size 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 temperate 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, ease in France, I don't rightly know where the place is, but it's called dugout. She had settled down for the remainder of her sojourn on this plane to a prospect of work, continuous work. A little more or a little less may 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 a few intervals for leisure in the duty hours of an orderly in an officer's ward. Had a sister and her nurses not been occupied elsewhere, I doubt whether I should have been free to drink the cup of tea at all, a circumstance of which perhaps Mrs. Mappin was more aware than I. At any rate, the call of orderly from a patient summoned me from the kitchen and into the ward long before I had finished drying Mrs. Mappin's dishes. The patient desired some small service performed for him. I performed it, remembering to address him as Sir. Various other patients observing my presence took the opportunity to hail me. I found myself saying, yes, Sir, in a moment, Sir, and dropping, with the promptitude on which I rather flatter myself, into the manner of a cross between a valet and a waiter, with a subtle dash of chambermaid. Soon I was also a luggage porter, staggering to a taxi with the ponderous impendimenta of a juvenile second lieutenant, who was bidding the hospital farewell, and whose trunks contained, and I guess, geological specimens and battlefield souvenirs in the shape of, done, German shells. This young gentleman fumbled with a gratuity, then thought better of it, and was gracious enough to return my gring. Bid awkward, tipping in these days. He apologized cheerily, depositing himself in his taxi behind ramparts of holdalls. Thank you, Sir. Seem the suitable, a new, and having proffered it, I scampered into the ward again. A non-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 supply of towels. Linen store eventually unearthed. Likewise, the information that its staff disclaimed, all responsibility for mistakes. Likewise, the first inkling of a profound maxim, that when a mistake has been made in hospital, it is always the orderly and no one else who has made it. Engaged on these errands, and a host of intervening lesser exploits in the ward, I had to cultivate an unwanted fleetness afoot. I flew. So did the time. Almost immediately, as it seemed to me, I was bitten 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 teaser 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 it involves struggle with a patient who had to be lifted from a bath chair into bed. I never lifted a human being before. Then a second bout of washing up with Mrs. Mappen. Then a nominal half an hour's respite for my own tea, actually 10 minutes, for I was behind hand. Then all too soon, more wadering at the ceremony of dinner. This time with the complication that some of my patients were allowed wine, beer or spirits, and some were not. Burgundy, sir, whiskey and soda, sir. I went round the table of the sitting at patients, displaying, I was pleased to think, the complete aplomb and nimbleness of a thoroughbred Swiss garçon, pouring out drinks with concealed envy, placing and removing plates, handing salt, bread, servants, after which back to Mrs. Mappen and her renewed mountain of once more to be washed and dried crockery. It was long after my own supper hour had come and gone that I was able to say au revoir to the ward. The cleansing of the grease-incrested meat tin was a travail which alone promised to last half the night. Mrs. Mappen eventually let me her assistance and later I became more adroit. And the calls of orderly from the bed patients were interruptions I could not ignore. But at last some sort of conclusion was reached. Mrs. Mappen put on her bonnet. The night orderly, who was to relieve me, was overdue. Sister, discovering me, stoned the kitchen, informed me that I might leave. You ain't had any supper, have you? said Mrs. Mappen. You won't get none now, neither. Should have done a bunk of full hour back, you should. She drew me into the larder and indicated the debris of our patients were passed. A leg of chicken and some rice pudding only wasted if you don't have it. But is it allowed? I was in truth not only tired but ravenous. Sister entering upon this conspiratorial dialogue unhesitatingly gave her approval. Cold rice pudding and a leftover 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 gray lounge suit. I shall know in future what it means when my restaurant waiter emerges from behind the screen service-store furtively wiping his mouth. I sympathize. I, too, have wolfed the choice-morsals from the banquet of my bedders. End of Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Of Observations of an Orderly This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Observations of an Orderly by Wardmere Chapter 2 Life in the Orderly's Hut In May 1915, when I enlisted, the weather was beautiful. Consequently, the row of tin huts to which I was introduced as my future address, for the duration, wore an attractive appearance. The sun shone upon their metallic sides and roofs, the shimmering foliage of tall trees, and a fine field of grass, which made a background to the huts, were fresh and green and rustle to the eye. Even the foreground of hard-trodden earth, the barrack square, was dry and clean, betray no hint of its quagmire repensities under rain. Later on when winter came, the cluster of huts could look dismal, especially before dawn on a wet morning, when the bugle sounding parade had dragged us from warm beds, or in an afternoon thaw after snow, when the corrugated eaves wept torrents in the twilight, and once feet, despite the excellence of army boots, were chilled by their weightings through slush. Meanwhile, however, the new recruit had nothing to complain of in the aspect of the housing accommodation which was offered him. Merely for amusement's sake, he had often roughed it in quarters far less comfortable than these bare but well-built huts, which he even proved on investigation to contain beds and unexpected luxury. I'll put you in hut six, said the Sergeant Major. There's one empty bed, it's the hut at the end of the line. Thereafter hut six was my home. And I hope I may never have a less pleasant one, or less good company for roommates. 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 down-sittings and our uprisings in hut six. There might have been an even number, twenty two, but one bed's place was monopolized by a stove, which in winter consumed coke and in summer was the repository of old newspapers and orange peel. The hut accordingly presented a vista of twenty one beds, eleven along one wall and ten along the other, the stove and its pipe being the sole interruption of the symmetrical perspective. Above the beds ran a continuous shelf, bearing the hut inhabitants equipment, or at least that portion of it, great coat, water bottle, mess tin, etc., not continually in use. Below each bed its owner's box and his boots were disposed with rigid precision at an exact distance from the box and boots beneath the adjacent bed. In the ceiling hung two electric lights. These, with the stove, beds, shelves, boxes, and boots, constituted the entire furniture of the hut. Unless you count an alarm clock, bought by public subscription, add notable for a trick of tinkling faintly, as though wanting to strike but failing. In the watches of the night, hours before its appointed minute had arrived. That contained no other furniture, whatever, and in those days did not seem to us to require any. In the autumn, when the daylight shortened and we could no longer hold our parliaments on a bench outside, a couple of deck chairs were mysteriously imported. And as the authorities remain unshocked, a small table also appeared and was squeezed into a gap beside the stove. Some sipperite even goaded us into getting up a fun for a strip of anoleum to be laid in the aisle between the beds. This was done, I do not know why, for personally I have no objection to bareboards. I suppose anoleum is easier to keep clean than wood. And that aisle, trapped 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 neighborhood, was sometimes far from speckless. But to me the strip of anoleum 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 overborn. An extraordinary proposition that we should inaugurate a plant in a pot on the stove's lid in summer was, I'm glad to say, negative. 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 8.30, after the second parade of the day, he marched through each hut, inspecting and then calling the attention of the Sergeant Major to any detail which offended his sense of fitness. On wet mornings, instead of parading outside, each man stood to his cot. And thus the comments of the company officer, as he went down the aisle, were audible to all. Stiffly drawn up to attention, we wondered anxiously whether he would notice anything wrong with our buttons, boots, or belts, or whether he would spot the books and jam jars hidden behind our overcoats on the shelves. Nothing so decadent and civilian as a book, and certainly nothing so unsightly as a jam jar, must be visible on your barricroom 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-naturely imparted to me by my new comrades. There was I learned a right way and a wrong way to fold all things foldable. The great coat, for instance, must at the finish of its foldings, when it is placed upon the exactly middle spot above your bed's end, present to the eye of the beholder a kind of flat-topped pyramid whose waistline, if a pyramid could be said to own a waist, is marked by the belt with the three polished buttons peeping through. The belt must bulge neither to the right nor to the left. The pyramidal edifice of great coat must not lull. It must sit up, prim, and firm. And it must all your foldings of the great coat, from first to last, have been deathly precise. No pyramid will reward you. But a flabby trapezium. The belt will sag, its buttons won't come centrally, and indeed the whole edifice of unwieldy cloth will topple off its perch on the narrow shelf. Which was designed to refuse all lodgment for the property of persons who had unsowed ideas on the subject of compact storage. The second series of folderies to which the novice was initiated concerned themselves with his bedding. This consisted of a mattress, three blankets, and a pillow. It is an outfit at which no one need turn up his nose. I never spent a bad night in army blankets, though when out on leave, I am sometimes a victim of insomnia between clean, cold sheets. But the moment the revelry uplifted you from your couch. That couch had to be made ship-shape according to rule. No finicky airing. The mattress must be rolled up, with a pillow as its core, and placed at the end of the bed. On top of it a blanket, folded longwise and with the ends hanging down, was laid neatly. On top of that, you put the other two blankets, folded quite otherwise. Then you brought the first blanket's ends over and reversed the resultant bundle and pressed it down into a thin stratified parallelogram with oval ends. The strata of the said parallelogram, viewed from the aisle, must show no blanket edges, only curves of the blanket's 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 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 not notice that every pillowcase of a ward's beds must face towards the same point of the compass. The pillows on the fister of beds must be placed in such a manner that the pillowcase mouths are, all of them, turned away from anyone entering the ward's door. Similarly, the overlap of the counterpains must all be of exactly the same depth, and caught up at exactly the same angle, the resulting series of pairs of triangles all ending at exactly the same spot in each bedstead. These triangles reveal, at a glance, the professional touch in a ward, and are, I understand, not by any means the insignia of a military as distinct from a civilian hospital. They may or may not contribute to the comfort of the patient, but they betoken, the captaincy of one whose methodicalness will in other and less visible respects most emphatically benefit him. Our hut life was something more than a mere folding up of bedding on bedsteads and great coats on shelves. After midday dinner it was allowable to unroll the mattress, make the bed, and rest thereon, which most of us by that time, having been on the run since six o'clock parade, were very ready to do. There was half an hour to spare before two o'clock parade, and a precious half hour it was. Snores rose from some of the beds where students of the war had collapsed beneath the newspapers, which they had meant to read. Dessertory conversation, in life in those corners where the denizens of the hut weren't 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 putties and brushing up the metal buttons of their walking-out tunics. Otherwise known as their square push suits. The buttons of their working tunics had, of course, been burnished before parade. The correct employment of button-sticks and of the magic cleaner called Soldier's Friend, the polishing of ones out of use boots and their placing on the floor with tied laces, and with their toes in line with the bedsteads. The substitution of lost braces buttons by Bulldogs, the fur machine 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 putties can be coaxed into a resemblance of spiral ones, and caused to ascend in corkscrews above trousers, which refused to tuck unlumpily into one's socks. These, and a host of other matters, always kept a proportion of the Hutt dwellers awake and busy and loquacious, even in the somnolent, post-prandial half-hour before two o'clock. But it was at night, at bedtime, that the Hutt became generally sociable. Lights out-sounded at ten-fifteen, and at ten-ten we were all scrambling into our pajamas. In winter our disrobing was hasty. In summer it was an affair of leisure, and decibel, romines, to and fro in the aisle, and gossip. When the bugle blue and the electric light suddenly ceased to glow, leaving the Hutt 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 warned Master, whose duty it was to make the round of the orderly's huts, disapprove to 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 warned Master always departed in the long run, and then uproads between bed and bed those inconclusive debates in which the masculine soul delight. Theology, woman, victuals, politics, art, the press, sport, marriage, money, and sometimes even the war. Likewise the purely local topics of sisters and their absurdities are officers, the other huts, what the Sergeant Major said, why VADs can't replace male orderlies, what this morning's operations look like, whether an officer's ward or a men's ward is the nicer, who deserves stripes, CEO'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 nearby railway-cutting. These had little power to disturb, tucked in the brown army blankets, which at first sight looked so hard and so prickly. We slumbered, the twenty-one of us, as one man, until, with the cruel jolt at five-fifteen, that wretched alarm clock crashed forth at summons for the vestidious few who liked to rise in ample time to bathe and shave before early parade. Sometimes I was of that virtuous ban, and sometimes I wasn't. But, either way, I hated the alarm clock at five-fifteen, though not so virulently as did those members of the hut, who never by any chance dreamt of rising until five to six. These gentry had reduced the ritual of dressing and of rolling up their bedding to a speed at which it might almost be compared to expert juggling, the quickness of the hand to see the eye. At five minutes to six you would see the juggler asleep on his pillow, in blissful innocence. At six he would be on parade, as correctly tired as you were yourself, and having left behind him in the hut, a bed as neatly folded as yours. The world is sprinkled with people who can do this kind of thing, and our hut was blessed with its due leaven of them. But I would not assert that they never had to put some finishing touches, either to their dress or to their hut-equipment foldings, before the company officer's tour of inspection at eight-thirty. It suffies that they would pass muster at six o'clock, when appearances are less minutely important. And the man who never rises till five, fifty-five, detests an alarm clock that wears at five-fifteen, the hour at which the alarm clock should be set to detonate, was one of our few acrimonious subjects of argument. I've even known it upset a discussion on a woman. But the early risers had their way, and the clock continued to be set for half an hour in front of Reveley. 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 commutal bonds of union, which evoked no little loyalty and affection from us all. On the main morning when I first beheld that corrugated iron abode, I thought it looked inviting enough. But I did not guess how fond I was to grove 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 ought to impair. For though 5.15 a.m. is an hour to test the temper of a troop of twenty-one saints, 10.15 p.m. will bring geniality and garalessness to twenty-one sinners. End of Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Of Observations of an Orderly This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Observations of an Orderly by Ward Muir Chapter 3 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, trickle, congealed cocoa, suet duff, skins of once hot milk, plates, cups, spying 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 scholarly mains. This I should not regret, but also with an only too clear picture, when at the dinner table, of the adventures of each dish of broken meats on its exit from view. I have been behind the scenes at the business of eating, or rather at the dreadful repairs, which must be instituted when the business of eating is concluded, in order that business of eating may recommence. There were days when, to me, the ward kitchen was 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 officer's. They did help, and that, right willingly. Sometimes I was blessed by the presence of a patient, with a passion for cleaning things. When there were no dishes to clean, he would clean taps. When the taps shown, 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 wards with nose and door handles. Between times he would clean his boots and shave patients in bed. The new army is thickly sewn with men like that. They are at the salt of the earth. I would place them at the summit of the Commonwealth's salary list, the bank clerk's second, and the businessman, the artist, and the politician at the bottom. At all events these were my sentiments when a patient of this type, convalescing, began to be able to help me with my kitchen chores. But it occasionally chanced that every single patient in the ward was confined to bed. It was then that I made most my intimate acquaintance with the catalog 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-air one fifteen arrived, the time when I should, but probably shall not be able to, leave for my own meal in the orderly's mass. But there are two far more serious opponents waiting to be subdued, the dinnerton and the pudding basin. This pair are hateful beyond words. Their memory will forever haunt me, a spectral disillusionment to spoil the relish of every repast I make and soon in the years that are ahead. The dinnerton was a rectangular box some three feet long, twenty inches wide and six inches deep. It was made of solid metal, was fitted with a false bottom to contain hot water, and was divided internally into three compartments to hold meat, vegetables, and duff. These vines were loaded into the tin at the hospital's central kitchen. I had not 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 dinnerton to its shelf in the central kitchen. For unless I restored that tin in a faultless state of cleanliness, the sergeant in charge of the central kitchen would require my blood. The tin's number would betray me. The sergeant needed not to know my name, all he had to do on discovering the questionable tin was to glance at its number and then send for the orderly of the ward with a corresponding number. He was the sergeant whose aspect could be very daunting. I never had to come before him on the subject of a journey, dinnerton, but he and I had some small passages concerning specials, separate diets ordered for patients requiring delicacies. Sometimes the necessary forms for the specials have been incorrectly made out by a sister with no head for army accuracy and 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 organization of his large and by no means simple department. There were moments, nevertheless, when I approached his presence with a sinking heart. For if I failed to get round him in the matter of coaxing another special for a patient, there was sister to placate on my return to the ward, and it was quite impossible to persuade sister that she could have made a mistake with her diet sheets or, if she had, that it was of any consequence. The dinnerton was somewhat larger than the sink in which I was supposed to wash it. It was also very heavy, wind full of food, and its full spot in charge 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 leftover slices of meat in the larder. These would be in a tea. Then I drained out the hot water from the false bottom. Then, but only after experience had given me wisdom, I ran hot water from the geyser tap into the now empty meat, vegetable, and duff compartments, and gave them a hurried swill. This, to rid them of the pestilent dregs of fatty material which would otherwise have dried and glued themselves to the floor of the tin, the latter had now to be put on one side, for I must be back in the ward attending to my diners. Only when they had finished their meal, and their bed-tables had been removed, folded up and placed neatly behind each bed, could I tackle the tin in earnest. I am more dabbling in Greece, but life is full of abhorrent dilemmas which must be endured, and the interior of that dinner tin somehow got itself cleaned every day in the long run. During the early part of any given week, I was almost happy over the job. For Monday was dry store day, on Monday, and on Monday only, and you were helpless for the remainder of the week if you forgot the rule. You could obtain on presentation of a chit, black lead for the stoves, metal polish for the brass, rags for cleaning the floor, floor polish, one box of matches, bath brick, soft soap, and soda. It is an extraordinary chemical soda. Before I became a ward orderly, I had no idea of the remarkable properties of soda. A handful of soda in boiling water, and behold, the grease dissolved meekly from the nastiest dinner tin. It was miraculous. When a pitying scrub lady first showed me the trick, I thought that all my troubles were at an end. Soda made the ward kitchen seem like heaven. Alas, the supply of soda considered sufficient by the dry store authorities never lasted beyond Wednesday. On Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, the dinner tin had to be cleaned out, not by alkaline agency, but by sheer slogging hard labor. 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 abduate 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 to scant at in the nursery, is food which as an adult I am far from despising. Rice pudding I have come with mature years to regard as a delicacy. Sago and tapioca I still eat rather with amiable resignation than from choice. But any milk pudding, as I now know, has the most vicious habit of cleaving to the dish in which it was cooked. Rice is the least evil offender. The others are absolutely wicked. To clean oleaginous scum from a dinner tin is not easy, but it is a mere bagatelle compared with cleaning the scorched high tide mark of tapioca or sago from the shores of a large metal pudding basin. I have tried scraping with a knife blade. I have tried every reasonable form of friction, and I can simply state as a fact from my own personal experience, perhaps I am unfortunate, that those metal pudding basins of ours would frequently yield to nothing less powerful than sandpaper. I need scarcely say that sandpaper was not supplied by the deities of the dry store. Sandpaper did not come within their purview. It had no recognized use in the hospital. Therefore it did not exist, but observing that the succession of metal pudding basins would be an insupportable prospect without sandpaper. I laid in a stock of sandpaper, paying for the same out of my own private purse. It was a cheap investment. Never have earnings of mine been better spent. Moreover, having once hit on the notion of giving myself a lift illegitimately, so to speak, I added to the smuggling in of sandpaper a secret purchase of soda. Except that our scrub ladies, each and all, discovering that the dry store's allowance of this priceless chemical had at last apparently been generous, caused it to fly at a disconcerting pace, and as result, sometimes left me short of it. My career as a wash rep 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, trickly plates, frying pans, which have sizzled dripping toast on the gas ring, frozen gravy and pudding basins with burnt milkskins, filmed to their sides. I shall be comparatively undismayed. For sandpaper is not yet, like the news posters, abolished. And soda, although I hear its price has risen several hundred percent, is still cheaper than, say, diamonds. End of Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Of Observations of an Orderly This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Observations of an Orderly by Ward Muir Chapter 4 A Hutt Hospital People of curious ideas of the kind of building which would make a good war hospital. The so-and-so club in Palm All, I have been told, should have been commandeered long ago, ideal for hospital purposes. Of course, some of the MP members brought influence to bear, and the War Office was choked off, and so forth. It would surprise me to hear of anything that the War Office was held back from doing if it wanted to do it. Perhaps the least likely obstructionist to be successful in this project would be a club-frequentine MP. The War Office is taken exactly and precisely what it chose, even when it would have been better to choose otherwise. In this matter of commandeering buildings for hospitals, it may or may not have acted with wisdom. But at least it has been safe in avoiding the advice of the individual, who jumped to the conclusion that just any upleasingly situated edifice will do. Provided beds and nurses are shoveled into it in sufficient quantities. The indignant Patriot, who was convinced that Chican alone saved the so-and-so club from being dedicated to the service of the Wunden, 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 trolleys from being wheeled to every worn, whether the arrangement of the building would allow the network of plumbing necessitated by the introduction of numerous bathrooms and laboratories, for each worn must possess both. Whether the kitchens were so located that they could supply food to top-floor patients without waste of caring labor on the part of the orderly staff. These problems, the mere fringe of the subject, had never occurred to our Patriot. His idea of a hospital was a place where soldiers lie in bed and get well. What queer notions visitors absorb of the easiness of hospital life. He had not glimpsed the organization, which made the cure possible. The man in bed, a sister hovering in the background with, apparently, nothing to do but look pleasant. These constituted for him the final phenomena of a war hospital. These phenomena, instead of being housed in a wooden, corrugated iron shed, might have been staged picturesquely in one of the luxurious salons of the so-and-so club in Palmall. It was a shame that they weren't. He would write to the papers about it. Somebody must be blamed. Somebody must be made to hustle. And meanwhile the sisters and doctors who were installed in gorgeous mansions for their work were openly envying the fortunate ones, who had been given those bare, but efficient and compactly planned sheds. Some years ago a number of public buildings were earmarked for hospital use in case of war. It may surprise the indignant Patriots to learn that any preparations, whatever, were made prior to the outbreak in 1914. Nevertheless, all kinds of preparations actually were made. Mistakes and miscalculations may have marred those preparations. The fact remains that, as far as the territorial medical service was concerned, the authorities had merely to press a button, and hospitals came into existence. Thus a number of institutions, mostly schools, found themselves ejected from their own roof-trees, found in short what many other folk were to learn later, that the state is omnipotent in wartime, and that sectional interests fade into insignificance, compared with the interests of the safety of the Commonwealth. Some conception of the promptness with which this paper scheme of Sir Alfred Keough, materialized at the outbreak of war, may be gathered from the simple statement that the building of which I myself write was an orphan's home on August 4, 1914. At 6 a.m. on August 5, it was a military hospital. I do not say that it was a military hospital in working order, but if, by a miracle, wounded had turned up then, there was at least a staff of medical officers and orderlies on the premises to receive them. In point of fact, it was some weeks before the first patients arrived. Those weeks, however, were not idle ones. The layman who considers that any large building, can be turned instantaneously into a hospital, would have had an eye-opener if he had witnessed the work done here. The mere removing of 95% of the institution's furniture was a colossal task. Added there, too, was the introduction of hundreds of beds, hundreds of mattresses, hundreds of sets of bedclothes, hundreds of suits of pajamas, hundreds of, but why prolong a brain-wracking 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 a bathrooms, laboratory's, ward kitchens, sink rooms, dispensary, cookhouse, operating theater, pathological laboratory, linen store, stewed store, clothing store, detention room, administration offices, x-ray department. All these in a building which, spacious and handsome outwardly, was, as to its interior, a characteristic maze in the Scottish baronial style of architecture beloved by mid-Victorian philanthropists. How the evicted orphans will like to return to those stone-flag passages and large airy dormitories after having experienced the cupboards of the banal but snug suburban villas in which they are at present located. I know not. There is a certain dignity about the Scottish baronial pile, I admit. The silhouette of its grey stone facade rising above delightful lawns makes a good impression from a distance. Postcard views of it saw freely to visitors. But the best part of our hospital is hidden behind the Tourette's facade and is much too ugly and utilitarian for postcard immortalization. The best part of our hospital, the hospital, to most of us, came into being when the common dear Scottish baronial orphan's asylum was found to be too small. Then were built the huts. The word hut suggests something casual of the camping out order, a shed knocked together with tin tacks, doubtfully weatherproof and probably scammed by profiteering contractors. Of the huts provided at certain training centers this may have been true. The fine austere and efficient ranks of hut wards, which constitute the main part of the third 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 tink greens and modifications were bound to follow when the regimen of workmen, carpenters, engineers, drainage specialists, electricians, had vanished. But in the long run the ideal hospital remained, a hospital with which the so-and-so club in Paul Mall, for all its luxuriousness, could never hope to compare. There are still a dozen wards used mostly for medical cases, in the Scottish Baronial Building. Its rooms, too, provide the administration with offices. Its great dining hall is a splendid receiving ward for the sorting out and clearance of newly arrived convoys of patients. We should be poorly situated indeed if we had not our Scottish Baronial Main Building to be the hub of the hospital's activities, or rather the handle from which springs the fan of the hospital's great extension, the huts. Approaching the hospital, the visitor sees nothing of those huts. As he walks up the drive, he flatters himself that he has reached his destination. He discovers his mistake when, at the inquiry bureau, in the entrance, he's informed that the patient whom he has come to interview is say in C-13. He's 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 redirection. Launching himself optimistically on this voyage, he learns, long ere he has attained his goal, that a modern war hospital can hide a considerable extent of pedestrianism behind a comparatively short Scottish Baronial Frontage. He will be fortunate if five minutes steady tramping brings him to the bedside of his friend in C-13. Perhaps he will contend himself in his foot soreness 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 HUD system. It consumes a big area, but it is all on one level, the ground level. The patient on crutches can go anywhere without fear of tripping. The patient in a wheelchair 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 cupboard corridors, wooden floored, galvanized iron roofed. It is a heart-breaking vista to the poor woman who has had no bus fare and is burdened by a baby in arms. It is a vista which seems to have no end. Corridor branches out of corridor, A corridor, B corridor, C corridor, D corridor, each with its perspective of doors opening into wards, and shorter corridors leading to storerooms and the like. But the patient or orderly who is 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 theaters, kitchens, stores, x-ray room, massage department, etc., and their stepless exit into the open air. Looked at from outside, a hot ward is, to the aesthetic eye, a hideous structure, knowing what it stands for, the science, the tenderness, and the fundamental civilization which it represents. We may describe, behind its stark geometrical outlines, a real nobility and beauty. Entering a typical hot ward, you behold thirty beds, fifteen on each side of the room. Between each pair of beds is a locker in which the patient stows his belongings. Woe betide him if his locker is not kept neat. In the central aisle of the room are the sister's writing table, certain other tables, chairs, and two Coke stoves for heating purposes in winter. The floor is carpetless and maintained in a meticulous state of high gloss by means of daily polishings. At a height of a few feet from the floor, the asbestos line walls cease and become windows. There's no gap in the continuous line of windows all down each side of the ward. A special type of window which, even when open, declines to allow rain to enter. In consequence of these windows, the ward is not only very well lit, but also airy and odorless. When all the windows are open, which is the case throughout the entire summer, and generally the case in winter also, the patient has the advantages of indoor comfort plus an outdoor atmosphere. At the end of the ward, a cupboard veranda is spacious enough to take an extra couple of beds for those requiring completely open air treatment. The ward proper has certain additions, a kitchen with gas stove and geyser, a sink room with geyser and cleansing apparatus of special pattern, a bathroom with geyser, laboratories, a small room for the isolation of the patient on the danger list, a linen room and cupboards. All these are packed neatly under the one rectangular corrugated roof which looks 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 soundness and most sanitary type of temporary hospital that the mind of man has yet devised. The raindrops may rattle a shame noisily on the roof. The asbestos lining may be devoid of ornamentation, but as he lies in bed and contemplates that unendorned ceiling, he is the deal better off than if you were gazing at the elaborate and dust harboring cornices of the so-and-so clubs, grandiose, smoking lounge, and palm-mall. CHAPTER V. FROM THE D-BLOCK WARDS. If you walk up the corridor at half past four on certain afternoons of the week, you will meet a mob of patients trooping from their wards to the concert room. Being built of wood and corrugated iron, the corridor is an echoing cave of noises. It echoes the tramp of feet, and army patterned boots were not sold for silence. It echoes the thud-thud of crutches. It echoes the slurred rumble of wheeled chairs and stretcher trolleys. But above all, at half past four on concert days, it echoes happy talk and chaff and boisterous laughter. As often as not, the loudest talk, the cheeriest chaff, the most spontaneous laughter, emanate from the blue-clad stalwarts who have mustered from the D-block wards. D-block contains the wards for eye-wound cases. Here they come, a string of them, mostly with bandages round their heads. The leading man owns one good eye, a twinkling eye, an eye of mischief, an eye, you would guess, at once, for the girls. But the eye's owner probably calls them the pushers. Such is our language now. Behind him, in single file, and in step with him, march a gang of patients, each with his hand on the shoulder of the man in front. Tramp, tramp! Their tread is purposely thunderous on the bareboards of the corridor. They sing as they advance. It is a ragtime chorus whose most memorable line runs, You never seem to kiss me in the same place twice. A jaunty lilt, to be sure, both in tune and in rhythm. Tramp, tramp! The one-eyed leader swerves round a corner, roaring the refrain. His followers swerve too. Suddenly the matron is encountered, emerging from her room. Fine afternoon, matron! The leader interrupts his chant to utter this hearty greeting. And with one voice. Fine afternoon, matron! exclaim his followers. But they do not turn their heads. Each with his hand rusting on the shoulder of the man in front they go steadily on, towards the concert room, with an odd intentness, glancing neither to one side nor the other. For though, at their leader's cue, they have hailed the matron, they have not seen her. They are blind. The spectacle of men, particularly young men, who have given their sight for their country, is, to most observers, a moving one. Melancholy are the reflections of the visitor who meets, for the first time, a promenading party of our blind patients. It is the plain truth, nevertheless, that the blind men themselves are far from Melancholy. One of the rowdiest characters we ever had in the hospital was totally blind. The blind men's wards are notoriously amongst the least sedate. I offer no explanation. I simply state the fact. I will fortify it by an anecdote. It came to pass that eight complementary tickets for Queen's Hall matinee were received by the matron, who in due course allotted them to seven deep-locked patients. And orderly, detailed to take them to the hall, completed the octet. Carpal Smith, the orderly in question, recounted his adventures afterwards. Never again, quoth he, shall I jump at a matinee job if there are blind chops in the potty. There, 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 Carpal Smith's narrative with blind men. One-legged men are often a sufficient care in maneuvering on and off omnibuses. Apparently helpless cripples have a marvelous gift for losing themselves, entering wrong trains, and generally escaping, as the hour for return draws nigh from one's custody. And the city seems to be full of lunatics ready to supply alcohol or indigestible refreshments to the most delicate war hospital inmates. Even with ordinary patients, the orderly's afternoon excursion is sometimes not unfraught with anxiety. But blind patients, as Carpal Smith said, are the deuce. Out of his party, four were totally blind. Two could recognize 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 ABC shop. Here, jock, one of the totally blind men, a scotchman, all scots are jocks in the army, distinguished himself by faciche, 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 Carpal Smith. Jock gave in the bird, but all off. But I thought about it time to be going home. So the party prepared to go home. The bus was voted dull. Somebody suggested the tube. Carpal Smith consented. He had forgotten that, at Oxford Circus Station, the lifts had been abolished in favor of sliding staircases. Confronted by the escalator, Carpal Smith halted his party and informed them that they must walk down by the ordinary stair. The escalator was not safe for blind men. Unfortunately, Jock had sniffed a lark. The one-eyed man backed him up. The party, elated perhaps by their tea, would not hear of anything so humdrum as a dissent by the ordinary stair. They were going on the sliding stair. They insisted. Carpal 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 Carpal Smith brought up the rear, supporting two of the more timid venturers as best he might. None of the group, except Carpal Smith himself, as it turned out, had ever traveled 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, Carpal Smith managed to send off his patients without a stumble. But as the stair and exorably lowered them into the bowels of the earth, he realized, only too vividly, what might happen at the foot of the dissent. The evening rush of suburb-bound passengers had begun, and the staircase was rather crowded. Nobody seemed to realize that the cocky, overcoated men who stood so still upon the steps were not the usual hospital convalescence out on leave, and able to look after themselves. Carpal Smith, delayed by one man who had hesitated at the top before taking the plunge, beheld his charges below him hopelessly dotted at intervals amongst the general public. It was impossible for him to struggle down ahead to the bottom of the staircase to guide the men off as they arrived. This task, he hoped, would be adequately performed by the one-eyed men. It might have been. The one-eyed men was game for anything. But Jock, arriving in the highest good humor at the bottom of the staircase, was tilled its sideways by the curve, and promptly sat down on the landing-place. Instead of rising, he proclaimed aloud that this was funnier even than England's pronunciation of the word skung, whereupon various hurrying passengers, including an old lady, tripped over his prone farm. The sensation of being kicked and sat upon appealed to Jock's sense of humor. 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'll 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, discomfitted. Jock's comments rooted her more effectively than the Corporal's assurance that the episode was none of his choosing. The party at last sorted itself out and was placed upon its feet once more. It was excessively pleased with its exploit. Hilarity reigned. Corporal Smith, relieved, made ready to conduct his squad to the platform. Alas! a bright idea occurred to Jock. Why not go up the other sliding stair and out again? Agreed, numb, con. At least Corporal Smith's con was too futile to be worth counting. I had to go with the blighters, said he. There was no end of a crowd by this time. And Jock and some of the others fell over at the top again. And there was a row with the ticket collector. And people kept saying they'd report me. And when I'd got my party down to the bottom for the second time, and some of the two officials had come and said they couldn't allow it, and we must buzz off home, I lined the fellows up to march them to the train and dash me if two weren't missing. They'd given me the slip. The two trunks, it may be added, could not be found. Corporal Smith had a return without them. At a late hour of the evening they appeared, not an atom repentant at the hospital, having persuaded someone to put them into the correct bus. One of them, Jock, explained that, being from the north, he had desired to seize this opportunity of seeing the sights of London. Jock, I may remind you, is totally blind. Jock's guide, the man who had volunteered to show him the sights and who had only once been in London before, could see very faintly the difference between light and dark. Thus this pair of irresponsibles had fared forth into the dusk of Regent Street. It sounds a very horrible fate to be blinded, but somehow the blind men themselves seldom seemed to be overwhelmed by its horribleness. If you want to hear the merriest banter in a war hospital, visit the blind man's wards. The pathos of them lies less in the sadness of the victims than in the triumphant wonderful fact that they are not sad. I wish we others all inhabited the same mysteriously jocun spiritual realm as Jock and his comrades, who come tramp-trapping to the concert-room down the corridor from the D-words. End of Chapter 5 The receiving hall of the hospital is its clearing-house of patience. 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 speech-ifying and prize distributions. May the time be not far distant when it will once again be used for those observances. Meanwhile, its vast floor is occupied by ranks of beds. Those beds are generally untenanted. Visitors who, like the lady in the play, have taken the wrong turning are apt to find themselves in the receiving hall, and gazing at its array of vacant beds have been known to conclude that the hospital was empty, as if any war hospital in these times could be empty. But our patients have only a short acquaintance-ship with the receiving hall beds. These beds are momentary resting places on their journey health-wards. 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 cozier 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 and 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 emitted, although now not so obviously imperative as in the early period of the war. Few patients reach us who have not first sojourned, either for a day or two or for weeks, in hospitals in France. They are therefore merely travel-stained, as you or I might be travel-stained after coming over from Dublin to Houston. The bath is thus a pleasure more than a necessity, whereas there was an era when our guests came straight from only two populist trenches. OC Baths, as the bathroom orderly was nicknamed, had to be circumspect in the performance of his job. The few minutes which the walking case spins in the receiving hall are occupied, one in drinking a cup of cocoa and two in having his particulars taken. Poor soul, he is weary of giving his particulars. He has had to give them half a dozen times at least, perhaps more, since he left the front. At the field dressing station they wanted his particulars, at the clearing station, on the train, at the base hospital, on another train, on the steamer, on the next train, and now in this English hospital. As he sits in comforts himself with cocoa, a VAD hovers at his elbow intent on a printed sheet, the details of which he 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, and undertaking on a scale beside which Harrods and Whitelies and Selfridges and Wannamakers and the magazine De Louvre, all rolled into one, would be a fleabight of simplicity. Air the morrow shall have dawned, our patient's military biography will be recounted by various clerks, and I don't know how many different entries. If you are curious, refer to one of our volumes of the Admission and Discharge Book Field Service Army Book 27A. Open it at any of its closely written pages, and see the host of ruled columns which the orderly in charge of it must encroach with reference to each of the many thousands of patients who pass through our hospital per annum. The columns ask for his regiment, squadron, battery or company, number, rank, surname, Christian name, age, length of service, completed months with field force, diseases, wounds and injuries are expressed by a number indicating their nature and whereabouts, date of admission, date of discharge or transfer, number of days under treatment, number of ward, religion, and observations, a space usually occupied by the name of the hospital ship upon which our friend crossed the channel and the name of the convalescent home to which he went on bidding us adieu. Having furnished the preliminary statements which lay the foundation of this compendious memoir, the walking case thankfully finishes his cocoa, picks up the package of blues which has been put at his side and departs with his fellows to the bathroom. There 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 protem is to be his only wear. When he emerges from the bathroom he is attired in what is now England's most honorable livery, the royal blue of the war hospital patient. And though perhaps the matter is not mentioned to him in so many words, his own suit is already ticketed with an identification label and on its way to the fumigator. This is no reflection on the owner of the suit, but there are some things we don't talk about. Mr. Fumigator Wala is not the least busy of the more retiring members of a war hospital staff. He is not in the limelight, but you might come to be very sad and sorry if he took it into his head to neglect his unapplauded part off stage. The walking cases are still splashing and dressing in the bathroom when the ambulances with the caught cases begin to appear. Now is the orderly's busy time. Each stretcher must be quickly but gently removed from the ambulance and carried into the receiving hall. Four orderlies haul the stretcher from its shelf in the ambulance. Two orderlies then take its handles and carry it indoors. At the entrance to the receiving hall they halt. The medical officer bends over the patient, glances at the label which is attached to him and assigns him to a ward. Certain types of cases go to certain groups of wards. The attendant sergeant promptly picks a metal ticket from a rack and lays it on the stretcher. The ticket has, punched on it, the number of the patient's ward and the number of the patient's bed in that ward. This ceremony completed the orderlies proceed with their burden up the aisle between the beds in the receiving hall. Arrived at the bed they lower their stretcher until it is at such a level that the patient, if he is active enough, can move off it onto the bed. If he is too weak to help himself, he is lifted onto the bed by orderlies under the direction of the receiving hall's sister. The stretcher is promptly removed and restored to its ambulance. If the patient is in an exceptionally suffering condition, he is not placed on the receiving hall bed. Instead, the medical officer having given his permission, his stretcher is put on a wheeled trolley and he is taken straight away to his ward so that he will only undergo one shift of position between the ambulance and his destination. The majority of stretcher cases, however, reach us in a by no means desperate state for, as I say, they seldom come to England without having been treated previously at a base abroad except during the periods of heavy fighting. And it is remarkable how often the patient refuses help in getting off the stretcher onto the bed. He may be a cocoon of bandages, but he will courageously heave himself overboard, from stretcher to bed with a gay wallop which would be deemed rash even in a person in perfect health. Our receiving hall, at a big intake of wounded, when every bed bears its poor victim of the war, presents a spectacle which might give the philosopher food for thought. But I suspect that if he regarded its actualities rather than his own preconceptions, what would impress him more than the sadness would be, on the one hand, the kindliness, brisk but not officious, of the staff, and on the other the spontaneous geniality of the battered occupants of the beds. The orderlies can spare little time for talk, but the few chats which they are able to have with patients whom they are helping to change their clothes or to whom they are proffering the inevitable cocoa, which is a cocktail as it were, prior to the meal which will be served in the men's own mord, are punctuated by jokes and laughter rather than the long visage sympathy, which the outsider might quite wrongly have pictured as appropriate to such an assemblage. The stretcher case, before he is taken to his ward, must also give his particulars, must also be interviewed by the pack store officials, and must also have assigned to him his blue uniform, wherewith are a shirt, a cravat, slippers, and socks, in anticipation of the time when he shall be able to use his feet again and promenade our corridors and grounds. He receives the customary packet of cigarettes, probably the second, for he often gets one at the railway station, too, and then on another stretcher, mounted on a trolley, is wheeled off to his ward. Here, bestowed in bed at last, we leave him to his blanket bath, his meal, his temperature taking, and chart filling in by the sister, his visit from the doctor and all the rest of it. For the moment we see no more of him, we must race back to the receiving hall, and, if there are no more patients to take away, return the trolley to its proper nook, put straight the blankets and pillows on the beds, sweep the floor, and tidy up generally, and readiness for the next convoy's advent. Presently the huge room, beneath its dim arch ceiling, is silent and empty once more. The four ranks of beds without a crease on their brown blankets are bare of occupants. The sister and her probationers have vanished. The pack store orderlies have carried off their loot of dirty khaki tunics and trousers for the fumigator. The clerical VADs have gone to enter particulars in ledgers and card indices. The cookhouse people have removed their cocoa urn. The sergeant is inspecting the metal ward tickets left in his rack. A glance at them tells him how many beds and which beds are free in the hospital, for the tickets have no duplicates. Any given ticket can only reappear in the rack when the bed which it connotes is out of use and awaiting a newcomer. The ticket hangs from a nail in the wall beside the patient's bed just so long as that bed is tenanted. So the rack of metal tickets might also take the place of that important document of which a freshly compiled addition 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 six-fifteen, twenty walking cases and seventeen cots, right you are. And at six-fifteen the party of order leads 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 clearinghouse of those damaged human bundles which are the raison d'etre of our great war hospital. End of Chapter 6 Chapter 7 of Observations of an Orderly This is a LibreVox recording. All LibreVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibreVox.org Observations of an Orderly by Ward Muir Chapter 7 T. A. War hospital patients are of many sorts. It is a common mistake of the armchair newspaper devour to lump all soldiers together as quaint, bibulous, H. dropping innocents, lamb-like and gauche in drawing rooms, fierce and picturesque on the field. Who, to judge by their published photographs, are continually on the grin and continually shaking hands, either with each other or with equally Grimson, French peasant woman. I caught his drawers or with the local mayor who congratulates them on the glorious VCs, which of course they are continually winning. In a war hospital that harbors many thousands of patients per annum, we should know in the long run something about the characteristics of Tommy Atkins. And it is with resentment that I hear him thus classified as a mere type. Discipline and training have given him some veneer of generalized similarities. Beneath these, Tommy Atkins is simply the man in the street, any man in any street. And if you look out of your window in the city and see a throng of pedestrians upon the pavement, you might just as well say that because they are all civilians, they're 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 in this notion that our gallant lads, as the sentimental scribe calls them, are a pack of children about whose exploits an unfailing stream of semi-pathetic, semi-humorous anecdotes must be put forth. Even the old professional army exhibited no dead level, either of black guards on the one hand or humble gallant lads on the other. But whatever may have been the case before the war, all the armies of Europe are now alike in this, that they are composed of civilians who merely happened to have adopted a certain garb for the performance of a certain job. And be it remarked, a temporary job. That garb has not reduced the citizens who have the honor 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 breed the sentiments of John Bull and the evening news. And I have had pacifists, they seem to have fought no less bravely, who week by week, read and approved Mr. Snowden in the labor leader. I've had radicals and Tories and patients who cared for neither party, but whose passion was cage birds or boxing or amateur photography. I've 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 in sanguine vocabulary and patients who were gently spoken and vestidious. Each of them was Tom Yackens, the innately smirking hero of the picture paper and the funny paragraph. Neither his picture nor the paragraph may be positively a lie. And yet when the armchair dweller chucklingly draws attention to them, I am tempted to relapse into a reverence and under one or other, or perhaps both, of two phrases which T. Ackens 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 Tom Yackens, it is the same thing as asserting that the respect and fondness are evoked by close contact with one's countrymen. Nothing more nor less. A hospital ward is a haphazard selection of one's fellow Britons. The most wildly haphazard it is possible to conceive. And the pessimistic cynic who after a sojourn in that changing company for a month or two can still either generalize 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 10th individuals with whom I sat silent in trains, whom I glanced at in business offices or behind counters, whom I saw in workshops or in the field or who were my neighbors in music halls, whom I saw in workshops or in the field or who were my neighbors 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 born the same surname, Ackens. Of course, there remain a few generalizations which can safely be risked about even so nondescript a person as the new Tommy Ackens. As practically all the Tommy Ackens' are, at this moment, concentrated on the prosecution of one great job, it is natural that their main interest should revolve around that job. They all, for instance, want the job to be finished. They all, within my experience, want it to be finished while. They nearly all desire earnestly to see soldiering as soon as the job is finished while. 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 in that humdrum desk have now become this traveled adventurer's most rosy dream. I have conversed with patients drawn from nearly every walk in life, and I do not remember one who definitely spoke of refusing to go back to his former work, if he could get it. One of my patients had been a subterranean lavatory attendant. You would have thought his admissions after visits to Egypt, Malta, the Dardanelles and France, might have soared to loftier altitudes. He had survived hair-raising adventures. He had taken part in the making of history. Although wounded, he had not been incapacitated for an active career in the future, and he was neither illiterate nor unintelligent. Yet he told me with obvious satisfaction that this 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 Traw of the Dight train, extorted from me a more enthusiastic sympathy than might be supposed possible. That agreeable, domestic pet, Homo sapiens, remains unchanged even when you dress him up in a uniform and set him fighting. He is always consistently inconsistent. He is always both reasonable and unreasonable. You can try to cast him in a mold, but he resumes his normal shapelessness the moment the mold is removed. Expose him to frightful ordeals of terror and pain, and he will emerge grumbling about some petty grievance or carrying on a flirtation with another man's wife or squabbling about sectarian dogmas or gambling on magazine competitions or planning new businesses. In fact, behaving precisely as the natural lord of creation always does behave. No member of our hospital staff, I imagine, will ever forget the arrival of the first batch of exchange British wounded prisoners. It was the most tragic scene I have ever witnessed. It is the 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'd received convoys of wounded many a time, but these broken creatures, so pale, so neglected, so thin and so infinitely happy to be free once more, had a poignant appeal which must have melted the most rigid official. And we are neither very official here nor very rigid. While amongst these liberated captives was one who told a sad tale of starvation at his internment camp, there's 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 10 months of entombment in order to mention that on the following morning when his breakfast was placed before him, he turned up his nose at it. Loudly complaining of the poorness of the food, he lent out of bed, picked up a brown paper parcel which had been his only luggage, and produced from mitsum German salted herring which he proceeded to eat with grumbling gusto. That is not specially Tommy Ackens. It is Homo sapiens of the hearth side. Whether in suburban villa or in slum, forever dissatisfied, more especially with his victuals, and forever evoking our affection on the same. No, Tommy Ackens is never twice alike. He is unanimous on few debatable matters. One of them, as I have said, is the desirability of finishing the war in the proper way. But even here there are differences as to what constitutes the proper way. Another is, I trust I shall not shock the reader, the extreme displeasiness 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 honor to them that few, if any, flinch from returning to duty, when they know only too well what the duty consists of, but they make no bones about their opinion. Not long ago, I was the conductor of a party of convalescences who went into a special matinee of a military drama. The theater 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 mean of applause. But when the heroine in a movie and 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 shot 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 in resolute. A 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 ask of a playwright hadn't been in the trenches, and if your usual audience has relished that kind of speech, they haven't been there either. So much for Tommy Atkins in his unanimous moon, unanimously condemning Kant, and at the same time unanimously courteous. Now that I come to reflect, I believe that, in his best moments, these are perhaps the only two points concerning which Tommy Atkins is unanimous. Whether he lives up to them or not, and to expect him unflinchingly to live up to them in season and out of season, is about as sensible as to expect him perpetually to live up to the photographs and anecdotes. We may take them as his ideal. He dislikes humbug. He tries to be polite. Could one sketch a sound or scaffolding on which to build all the odd divergences, crankinesses and heroisms, stupidities and engagingnesses? Which may go to make the edifice of an average decent soul's material, mental and spiritual habitation. Post script. 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 Anns. When wounded in our hospital, they did want to go back to fight. But their sole reason, given with frankness, was that they considered they were needed. The new army in training was not ready. It would be murder to send the new army out unprepared to such an ordeal. This authority, who has interviewed many thousands of convolescents, further remarked, the wounded man who has been under shellfire and who professes to be eager to go back whether ordered or no, is a liar. On the other hand, the scrim shankers who try to get out of going back when they should go back are an amazingly small minority. End of chapter seven. Chapter eight of observations of an orderly. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Observations of an orderly by Ward Mir. Chapter eight, laundry problems. A number of oddly unmasculine duties felt a lot of the RAMC orderly prior to the time when VADs 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 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 scrutinize his collars, handkerchiefs, and underclothes before and after their trips to the laundry. He has seldom, I think, had intimate trafficking with pillowcases, sheets, counterpains, and tablecloths. In the reckoning of these, he is apt to make mistakes and elapsed into a casualness which, in a woman familiar with household routine, would be improbable. Sisters' sharpest reproofs were called forth by errors made in connection with this daily exchange of clean for dirty linen. A form, of course, had to be filled in. The army provides a form for everything. This form presents a catalog of 81 separate items from blankets, childs, and fins. 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 waistcoats, straight. It distinguishes between 10 kinds of cases, pillowcases, palais cases, and the like. For example, there are barrack bolster cases and hospital bolster cases. And you must not confound hospital mattress cases with officers' mattress cases. You are misled if you imagine the heading cases has exhausted the possibilities which appeared to be latent in that now. For in addition to the 10 unqualified cases, there are seven more defined as cases slip. Can you wonder that the orderly presented with a bin full of confused and crumpled objects ready for the wash, and told to count them and enter their numbers in the appointed columns, occasionally made a wrong guess? Then there were eight sorts of cloths, tablecloth, traycloth, distinctive cloth, and so forth. To how many lay minds does distinctive cloth convey any meaning? Counterpains you would think to be obvious enough, but that remarkable compilation, the checkbook for hospital linen, printed for HM stationary office, et cetera, recognizes 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 a strict barter of a soiled object for a clean duplicate of the same object. As there are 365 days in the year on which this transaction occurs, and 60 wards bundles of linen to be dealt with by both the dirty linen department and the clean linen department on each of those days, it is clear that exactitude in the filling in of the form, aforementioned, becomes an affair of almost nightmare importance. Bring back from the clean linen store, three dusters instead of the four dusters which you previously handed in at the dirty linen store, and your cupboard will, to the end of time, be short of one duster, which it should have possessed. Even if sister fails to pounce promptly on the evidence of the loss, the quartermaster's dread stock taking will ultimately find you out. Your cupboard declines to correspond with his book entries, and there is trouble brewing in consequence. But indeed, if the loss of a single duster were the sole crime revealed on stock taking day, you would be fortunate. The orderly, with an obese bundle of washing on his back, plods from the ward to the dirty linen store at quarter to nine every morning. I say he plods because the bundle is generally too heavy for a transportation at a rapid pace. 20 sheets are usually but a part of the bundle, and 20 sheets are alone, no light burden. Between his teeth, both his hands being occupied with the balancing of the bundle, he carries his chit, that indispensable list. Arrived at the store, he dumps the bundle on the ground, opens it, and pitches its contents piecemeal over a counter to one of the staff of the store. One by one, the objects are named and counted aloud as they fly across the counter. The staff, orderly, simultaneously checking the list and keeping an eye on what he is receiving. For we may, by Guile, palm off on him one sheet as two. It can't be done with a certain legid domain that comes with practice. Or we may have received from the dry store amongst the rags meant for cleaning purposes, a couple of quite worn out socks, not a pair, and long past placing on human feet. These derelicts with a rapid motion can be passed over the counter amongst the good socks, and only later in the day will the dirty linen store officials detect the fraud when it is impossible to locate its perpetrator. The store orderly's job is therefore one requiring some astuteness. His checking of the list has to be achieved at a high speed and in the midst of a bobble. 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'm afraid, were not infrequent in the epoch when the actors in this drama were of the male sex. Even now, when the scene is mainly feminine, I believe differences of opinion continue to arise, but doubtless the language in which they are conducted is seamlier, if no less deadly. The store orderly had a marvelous eye for the difference between two kinds of shirts which are worn by our patients. One kind has a pleat in the back, the other kind hasn't, and I confess I occasionally transposed them on the form. It was fatal to do so. There was a separate line for each brand of shirt, and there must be a separate entry. The store orderly's trained powers of observation could see that pleat, or the absence of it, even as the shirt slid across his line of vision in a torrent of other shirts. His hand shot out and grabbed it back from joining the heap on the floor within the counter. His pencil poised itself from the ticking off of the items on the form. Wrong again, he would cry, sometimes in English and sometimes in anger. And there was nothing for it, but to apologize. To keep on good terms with the various orderlies in the various stores was the secret of making one's life worth living. A secret, even profounder than that of keeping on good terms with sister. To be sure it was, though she seldom realized 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 journeys 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 ringer in a tea-cloth, could devastate the harmony of a whole fornute. A sweet reasonableness was undoubtedly the note to strike when such a contra-tem occurred. Having got quit of the last item in your bundle, you returned to the ward to attend to the other and generally less entertaining duties until such time as it was proper to repair to the clean linen store. The staff of the clean linen store, a huge department whose system of bookkeeping is enough to make the brain real, for here, sheets, et cetera, are dealt with not in dozens, but in thousands. Had in the interim received your chit from their colleagues of the dirty linen store, these latter, rashly or otherwise, had guaranteed his accuracy by initialing it. Accordingly, in the clean linen store, a fresh bundle was ready for your acceptance. It's contents consisting of duplicates of the objects now on their way to the laundry. It was unwise, however, to accept this neatly folded and virginal bundle without investigation. It might contain what the chit demanded, or it might not. Before you could carry it off, you must yourself initial and finally bid farewell to the chit. Thereby certifying that you had got what you claimed. To make sure of this, you would be well advised to undo the bundle, and as far as was practical in a jostling crowd of fellow orderlies similarly employed, run through the whole of its contents, computing them with precision. 20 sheets, 12 pillowcases, nine bolster cases. It is only too easy to miss the difference in the sizes of these, 17 hand towels, two operating aprons, 11 handkerchiefs, 10 pajama trousers, 10 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, defined 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 warrant stock taking 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 best put to the test, I admit I wished that I had refrain from so temerarius and adventure. Somehow or other, I had managed to come back to the ward with three clean pillowcases 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 remain, nevertheless, the pressing problem of the three strayed pillowcases. 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 pillowcases. 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've already had them. Your initial chit testifies the fact. At all events, after some parlay, the clean linen store sergeant, who was less of an ogre than he pretended, offered to strike a bargain with me. If I would count all the pillowcases in and out of use in my ward, and bring him the total, he would compare the said total with the figures in his ledger. Those figures he would not divulge to me, but if the number I announced was three short of the number in his ledger, he would give me the three and say no more about it. The bargain seemed a fair one. In sister's absence, I spent a precious half hour of what should have been my afternoon off, and counting all the pillowcases I could find in the ward. A good-natured probationer, who sympathized with me in my difficulties, she too had suffered, counted them also. A convalescent patient interested himself in the problem. He also went around in the beds and investigated the cupboard, counting all the pillowcases. We three each arrived at the same total. Armed with this total, I marched back to the sergeant in the clean linen store. He turned up his ledger and ran his finger down the page till he came to the entry of pillowcases opposite to my ward. And then he laughed, a laugh, a fiendish glee. Do you know, he said, instead of having three pillowcases too few, you've seven too many. Such are the traps set by the businessman, the expert of ledgers, for the innocent amateur. We'd actually got more pillowcases than we were entitled to. All unwittingly, and my eagerness to placate sister, I had published the mild chicaneery in which she had indulged on behalf of her ward. The sergeant, growing gray in the solution of these abstruse, mathematical and psychological mysteries, had suspected this sister all along. He enlightened me. She'd 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 surprise dock taking in her new ward. The seven surplus pillowcases and perhaps other loot would have to be explained. Sister, in short, was in for Mawaw Quartier. It was a suitable penalty for her crossness. It should have taught her the perils of crossness. With regret, I add that she did not envisage the episode in that light. She was merely rather crosser than before. It was without any profound sorrow that I soon afterwards bade her farewell on her departure to oversee 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 stock taking. Never again would I risk a combat with a ledger fortified sergeant. Never again would I risk an attempt at the torturous in my dealings with the classifications of the 81 items on the tear-off leaf of that dire volume, the checkbook for Hospital Linen. End of chapter eight.