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OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital
by
L.-CPL. WARD MUIR, R.A.M.C. (T.)
Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton,
Kent & Co., Ltd., 4 Stationers'
Hall Court : : : London, E.C.4
Copyright
First published July 1917
Novels by the Author of "Observations of an Orderly"
THE AMAZING MUTES
WHEN WE ARE RICH
CUPID'S CATERERS
Also Editor of
"HAPPY--THOUGH WOUNDED"
The Book of the Third London General Hospital
TO
LT.-COL. H.E. BRUCE PORTER, C.M.G.
OFFICER IN COMMAND OF THE
3RD LONDON
GENERAL HOSPITAL
Some passages from _Observations of an Orderly_ have appeared,
generally in a shorter form, in _The Spectator_, _The New Statesman_,
_The Hospital_, _The Evening Standard_, _The National News_, _The Dundee
Advertiser_, _The Daily News_, and _The Daily Mail_. The author desires
to make the usual acknowledgments to their editors.
The coloured design on the paper wrapper is by Sergeant Noël Irving,
R.A.M.C. (T.), a member of the unit at the 3rd London General Hospital.
CONTENTS
I PAGE
MY FIRST DAY 19
II
LIFE IN THE ORDERLIES' HUTS 33
III
WASHING-UP 51
IV
A "HUT" HOSPITAL 65
V
FROM THE "D BLOCK" WARDS 79
VI
WHEN THE WOUNDED ARRIVE 93
VII
"T.... A...." 107
VIII
LAUNDRY PROBLEMS 121
IX
ON BUTTONS 137
X
A WORD ABOUT "SLACKERS IN KHAKI" 147
XI
THE RECREATION ROOMS 159
XII
THE COCKNEY 173
XIII
THE STATION PARTY 201
XIV
SLANG IN A WAR HOSPITAL 219
XV
A BLIND MAN'S HOME-COMING 235
I
MY FIRST DAY
The sergeant in charge of the clothing store was curt. He couldn't help
it: he had run short of tunics, also of "pants"--except three pairs
which wouldn't fit me, wouldn't fit anybody, unless we enlisted three
very fat dwarfs: he had kept on asking for tunics and pants, and they'd
sent him nothing but great-coats and water-bottles: I could take his
word for it, he wished he was at the Front, he did, instead of in this
blessed hole filling in blessed forms for blessed clothes which never
came. Impossible, anyhow, to rig me out. I was going on duty, was I?
Then I must go on duty in my "civvies."
It was a disappointment. Your new recruit feels that no small item of
his reward is the privilege of beholding himself in khaki. The escape
from civilian clothes was, at that era, one of the prime lures to
enlistment. I had attempted to escape before, and failed. Now at last I
had found a branch of the army which would accept me. It needed my
services instantly. I was to start work at once. Nothing better. I was
ready. This was what I had been seeking for months past. But--I confess
it--I had always pictured myself dressed as a soldier. The postponement
of this bright vision for even twenty-four hours, now that it had seemed
to be within my grasp, was damping. However--! The Sergeant-Major had
told me that I was to go on duty as orderly in Ward W--an officers'
ward--at 2 p.m. prompt. I did not know where Ward W was; I did not know
what a ward-orderly's functions should amount to. And I had no uniform.
I was attired in a light grey lounge suit--appropriate enough to my
normal habit, but quite too flippant, I was certain, for a ward-orderly.
Whatever else a ward-orderly might be, I was sure that he was not the
sort of person to sport a grey lounge suit.
Still, I must hie me to Ward W. I had got my wish. I was in the army at
last. In the army one does not argue. One obeys. So, having been
directed down an interminable corridor, I presented myself at Ward W.
On entering--I had knocked, but no response rewarded this courtesy--I
was requested, by a stern-visaged Sister, to state my business. Her
sternness was excusable. The visiting-hour was not yet, and in my
unprofessional guise she had taken me for a visitor. My explanation
dispelled her frowns. She was expecting me. Her present orderly had been
granted three days' leave. He was preparing to depart. I was to act as
his substitute. Before he went he would initiate me into the secrets of
his craft. She called him. "Private Wood!" Private Wood, in his
shirt-sleeves, appeared. I was handed over to him.
Herein I was fortunate, though I was unaware of it at the time. Private
Wood, who was not too proud to wash dishes (which was what he had at
that moment been doing), is a distinguished sculptor and a man of keen
imagination. At a subsequent period that imagination was to bring forth
the masks-for-facial-disfigurements scheme which gained him his
commission and which has attracted world-wide notice from experts.
Meanwhile his imagination enabled him to understand the exact extent of
a novice's ignorance, the precise details which I did not know and must
know, the essential apparatus I had to be shown the knack of, before he
fled to catch his train.
He devoted just five minutes, no more, to teaching me how to be a
ward-orderly. Four of those minutes were lavished on the sink-room--a
small apartment that enshrines cleaning appliances, the taps of which,
if you turn them on without precautions, treat you to an involuntary
shower bath. The sink-room contains a selection of utensils wherewith
every orderly becomes only too familiar: their correct employment, a
theme of many of the mildly Rabelaisian jests which are current in every
hospital, is a mystery--until some kind mentor, like Private Wood, lifts
the veil. In four minutes he had told me all about the sink-room, and
all about all the gear in the sink-room and all about a variety of
rituals which need not here be dwelt on. (The sink-room is an excellent
place in which to receive a private lecture.) The fifth minute was spent
in introducing me, in another room, the ward kitchen, to Mrs.
Mappin--the scrub-lady.
A scrub-lady is attached to each ward; and most wards, it should in
justice be added, are attached to their scrub-ladies. Certainly I was to
find that Ward W was attached to Mrs. Mappin. Mrs. Mappin was washing
up. Private Wood had been helping her. The completion of his task he
delegated to me. "Mrs. Mappin, this is our new orderly. He'll help you
finish the lunch-dishes." Private Wood then slid into his tunic,
snatched his cap from a nail in the wall, and vanished.
Mrs. Mappin surveyed me. "Ah!" she sighed--she was given to sighing.
"He's a good 'un, is Private Wood." The inference was plain. There was
little hope of my becoming such a good 'un. In any case, my natty grey
tweeds were against me. One could never make an orderliesque impression
in those tweeds. "Better take your jacket off," sighed Mrs. Mappin. I
did so, chose a dishcloth, and started to dry a pyramid of wet plates.
For a space Mrs. Mappin meditated, her hands in soapy water. Then she
withdrew them. "I think," she sighed, "you an' me could do with a cup of
tea."
And presently I was having tea with Mrs. Mappin.
I was afterwards to learn that this practice of calling a halt in her
labours for a cup of tea was a highly incorrect one on Mrs. Mappin's
part, and that my share in the transaction was to the last degree
reprehensible. But I was also to learn that faithful, selfless, honest,
and diligent scrub-ladies are none too common; and the Sister who
discovers that she has been allotted such a jewel as Mrs. Mappin is
seldom foolish enough to exact from her a strict obedience to the letter
of the law in discipline. Mrs. Mappin, in her non-tea-bibbing
interludes, toiled like a galley-slave, was rigidly punctual, and never
complained. Her sighs were no index of her character. They were not a
symptom of ennui (though possibly--if the suggestion be not rude--of
indigestion caused by tannin poisoning). She was the best-tempered of
creatures. It is a fact that if I had been so disposed I need never have
given Mrs. Mappin any assistance, though it was within my province to do
so. She would, without a murmur, shoulder other people's jobs as well as
her own. Having finished with bearing children (one was at the Front--it
was Mrs. Mappin who, on being asked the whereabouts of her soldier son,
said, "'E's in France; I don't rightly know w'ere the place is, but it's
_called_ 'Dugout'"), she had settled down, for the remainder of her
sojourn on this plane, to a prospect of work, continuous work. A little
more or a little less made no difference to her. She had nothing else to
do, but work; nothing else to be interested in, except work--and her
children's progress, and her cups of tea. Her ample figure concealed a
warm heart. Behind her wrinkled old face there was a brain with a
limited outfit of ideas--and the chief of those ideas was _work_.
Our cup of tea was refreshing, but it would be incorrect to convey the
notion that I was allowed to linger over such a luxury. There are few
intervals for leisure in the duty-hours of an orderly in an officers'
ward. Had the Sister and her nurses not been occupied elsewhere, I doubt
whether I should have been free to drink that cup of tea at all--a
circumstance of which perhaps Mrs. Mappin was more aware than I. At any
rate the call of "Orderly!" from a patient summoned me from the kitchen
and into the ward long before I had finished drying Mrs. Mappin's
dishes.
The patient desired some small service performed for him. I performed
it--remembering to address him as "Sir." Various other patients,
observing my presence, took the opportunity to hail me. I found myself
saying "Yes, Sir!" "In a moment, Sir!" and dropping--with a promptitude
on which I rather flattered myself--into the manner of a cross between a
valet and a waiter, with a subtle dash of chambermaid. Soon I was also a
luggage-porter, staggering to a taxi with the ponderous impedimenta of a
juvenile second lieutenant who was bidding the hospital farewell, and
whose trunks contained--at a guess--geological specimens and battlefield
souvenirs in the shape of "dud" German shells. This young gentleman
fumbled with a gratuity, then thought better of it--and was gracious
enough to return my grin. "Bit awkward, tipping, in these days," he
apologised cheerily, depositing himself in his taxi behind ramparts of
holdalls. "Thank you, Sir," seemed the suitable adieu, and having
proffered it I scampered into the ward again. Anon Sister sent me with a
message to the dispensary. Where the dispensary was I knew not. But I
found out, and brought back what she required. Then to the post office.
Another exploration down that terrific corridor. Post office located at
last and duly noted. Then to the linen store to draw attention to an
error in the morning's supply of towels. Linen store eventually
unearthed--likewise the information that its staff disclaimed all
responsibility for mistakes--likewise the first inkling of a profound
maxim, that when a mistake has been made, in hospital, it is always the
orderly, and no one else, who has made it.
Engaged on these errands, and a host of intervening lesser exploits in
the ward, I had to cultivate an unwonted fleetness of foot. I flew. So
did the time. Almost immediately, as it seemed to me, I was bidden to
serve afternoon tea to our patients. The distribution of bed-tables, of
cups, of bread-and-butter (most of which, also, I cut); the "A little
more tea, Sir?" or, "A pot of jam in your locker, Sir, behind the pair
of trousers?... Yes, here it is, Sir"; the laborious feeding of a
patient who could not move his arms;--all these occupied me for a
breathless hour. Then an involved struggle with a patient who had to be
lifted from a bath-chair into bed. (I had never lifted a human being
before.) Then a second bout of washing-up with Mrs. Mappin. Then a
nominal half-an-hour's respite for my own tea--actually ten minutes, for
I was behindhand. Then, all too soon, more waitering at the ceremony of
Dinner: this time with the complication that some of my patients were
allowed wine, beer, or spirits, and some were not. "Burgundy, Sir?"
"Whiskey-and-soda, Sir?" I ran round the table of the sitting-up
patients, displaying (I was pleased to think) the complete aplomb and
nimbleness of a thoroughbred Swiss _garçon_, pouring out drinks--with
concealed envy--placing and removing plates, handing salt, bread,
serviettes.... After which, back to Mrs. Mappin and her renewed mountain
of once-more-to-be-washed-and-dried crockery.
It was long after my own supper hour had come and gone that I was able
to say au revoir to the ward. The cleansing of the grease-encrusted
meat-tin was a travail which alone promised to last half the night.
(Mrs. Mappin eventually lent me her assistance, and later I became more
adroit.) And the calls of "Orderly!" from the bed patients were
interruptions I could not ignore. But at last some sort of conclusion
was reached. Mrs. Mappin put on her bonnet. The night orderly, who was
to relieve me, was overdue. Sister, discovering me still in the kitchen,
informed me that I might leave.
"You ain't 'ad any supper, 'ave you?" said Mrs. Mappin. "You won't get
none now, neither. Should 'ave done a bunk a full hower back, you
should."
She drew me into the larder, and indicated the debris of our patients'
repast. "A leg of chicken and some rice pudden. Only wasted if _you_
don't 'ave it."
"But is it allowed--?" I was, in truth, not only tired but ravenous.
Sister, entering upon this conspiratorial dialogue, unhesitatingly gave
her approval.
Cold rice pudding and a left-over leg of chicken, eaten standing, at a
shelf in a larder, can taste very good indeed, even to the wearer of a
spick-and-span grey lounge suit. I shall know in future what it means
when my restaurant waiter emerges from behind the screened service-door
furtively wiping his mouth. I sympathise. I too have wolfed the choice
morsels from the banquet of my betters.
II
LIFE IN THE ORDERLIES' HUTS
In May, 1915, when I enlisted, the weather was beautiful. Consequently
the row of tin huts, to which I was introduced as my future address "for
the duration," wore an attractive appearance. The sun shone upon their
metallic sides and roofs. The shimmering foliage of tall trees, and a
fine field of grass, which made a background to the huts, were fresh and
green and restful to the eye. Even the foreground of hard-trodden
earth--the barrack square--was dry and clean, betraying no hint of its
quagmire propensities under rain. Later on, when winter came, the
cluster of huts could look dismal, especially before dawn on a wet
morning, when the bugle sounding parade had dragged us from warm beds;
or in an afternoon thaw after snow, when the corrugated eaves wept
torrents in the twilight, and one's feet (despite the excellence of army
boots) were chilled by their wadings through slush. Meanwhile, however,
the new recruit had nothing to complain of in the aspect of the housing
accommodation which was offered him. Merely for amusement's sake he had
often "roughed it" in quarters far less comfortable than these bare but
well-built huts--which even proved, on investigation, to contain beds:
an unexpected luxury.
"I'll put you in Hut 6," said the Sergeant-Major. "There's one empty
bed. It's the hut at the end of the line."
Thereafter Hut 6 was my home--and I hope I may never have a less
pleasant one or less good company for room-mates. In these latter I was
perhaps peculiarly fortunate. But that is by the way. It suffices that
twenty men, not one of whom I had ever seen before, welcomed a total
stranger, and both at that moment and in the long months which were to
elapse before various rearrangements began to scatter us, proved the
warmest of friends.
Twenty-one of us shared our downsittings and our uprisings in Hut 6.
There might have been an even number, twenty-two, but one bed's place
was monopolised by a stove (which in winter consumed coke, and in summer
was the repository of old newspapers and orange-peel). The hut,
accordingly, presented a vista of twenty-one beds, eleven along one wall
and ten along the other, the stove and its pipe being the sole
interruption of the symmetrical perspective. Above the beds ran a
continuous shelf, bearing the hut-inhabitants' equipment, or at least
that portion of it--great-coat, water-bottle, mess-tin, etc.--not
continually in use. Below each bed its owner's box and his boots were
disposed with rigid precision at an exact distance from the box and
boots beneath the adjacent bed. In the ceiling hung two electric lights.
These, with the stove, beds, shelves, boxes and boots, constituted the
entire furniture of the hut--unless you count an alarm-clock, bought by
public subscription, and notable for a trick of tinkling faintly, as
though wanting to strike but failing, in the watches of the night, hours
before its appointed minute had arrived. The hut contained no other
furniture whatever, and in those days did not seem to us to require any.
In the autumn, when the daylight shortened and we could no longer hold
our parliaments on a bench outside, a couple of deck-chairs were
mysteriously imported; and, as the authorities remained unshocked, a
small table also appeared and was squeezed into a gap beside the stove.
Some sybarite even goaded us into getting up a fund for a strip of
linoleum to be laid in the aisle between the beds. This was done--I do
not know why, for personally I have no objection to bare boards. I
suppose linoleum is easier to keep clean than wood; and that aisle,
tramped on incessantly by hobnail boots which in damp weather were, as
to their soles and heels, mere bulbous trophies of the alluvial deposits
of the neighbourhood, was sometimes far from speckless. But to me the
strip of linoleum made our hut look remotely like a real room in a real
house: it was a touch of the conventional which I never cared for, and I
only subscribed to it when I had voted against it and been overborne. An
extraordinary proposition, that we should inaugurate a plant in a pot
on the stove's lid in summer, was, I am glad to say, negatived. It would
have been the thin end of the wedge ... we might have arrived at
Japanese fans and photograph-frames on the walls.
Not that our Company Officer would have tolerated any nonsense of that
kind. Punctually at eight-thirty, after the second parade of the day, he
marched through each hut, inspecting it and calling the attention of the
Sergeant-Major to any detail which offended his sense of fitness. On wet
mornings, instead of parading outside, each man stood to his cot, and
thus the comments of the Company Officer, as he went down the aisle,
were audible to all. Stiffly drawn up to attention, we wondered
anxiously whether he would notice anything wrong with our buttons, boots
or belts, or whether he would "spot" the books and jam jars hidden
behind our overcoats on the shelves. Nothing so decadent and civilian as
a book--and certainly nothing so unsightly as a jam jar--must be visible
on your barrack-room shelf. It is sacred to equipment, and particularly
to the folded great-coat.
"The Art of Folding" might have been the title of the first lesson of
the many so good-naturedly imparted to me by my new comrades. There was,
I learnt, a right way and a wrong way to fold all things foldable. The
great-coat, for instance, must at the finish of its foldings, when it is
placed upon the exactly middle spot above your bed's end, present to the
eye of the beholder a kind of flat-topped pyramid whose waist-line (if a
pyramid can be said to own a waist) is marked by the belt with the three
polished buttons peeping through. The belt must bulge neither to the
right nor to the left; the pyramidal edifice of great-coat must not
loll--it must sit up prim and firm. And unless all your foldings of the
great-coat, from first to last, have, been deftly precise, no pyramid
will reward you, but a flabby trapezium: the belt will sag, its buttons
won't come centrally, and indeed the whole edifice of unwieldy cloth
will topple off its perch on the narrow shelf--which was designed to
refuse all lodgment for the property of persons who had unsound ideas
on the subject of compact storage.
The second series of folderies to which the novice was initiated
concerned themselves with his bedding. This consisted of a mattress,
three blankets and a pillow. It is an outfit at which no one need turn
up his nose. I never spent a bad night in army blankets, though when out
on leave I am sometimes a victim of insomnia between clean cold sheets.
But the moment the Réveillé uplifted you from your couch, that couch had
to be made ship-shape according to rule. No finicky "airing"! The
mattress must be rolled up, with the pillow as its core, and placed at
the end of the bed. On top of it a blanket, folded longwise and with the
ends hanging down, was laid neatly; on top of _that_ you put the other
two blankets, folded quite otherwise; then you brought the first
blanket's ends over, and reversed the resultant bundle and pressed it
down into a thin stratified parallelogram with oval ends. The strata of
the said parallelogram, viewed from the aisle, must show no blanket
_edges_, only curves of the blankets' folds: the edges (if visible at
all) must face inwards, not outwards. Correct folding, to be sure, gave
no visible edges, viewed from either side; and, once you caught the
knack, correct folding was just as easy as incorrect--though there were
temperaments which did not find it so and which rebelled against these
niceties.
I was afterwards to learn that this mania for matching (if mania be
indeed a legitimate word for a custom based on common-sense principles
and seldom carried to the extremes which the recruit has been led to
fear) obtains not only in the army but also in the nursing profession.
Not long after I became a ward orderly I got a wigging from my "Sister"
because I had not noticed that every pillow-case of a ward's beds must
face towards the same point of the compass: the pillows on the vista of
beds must be placed in such a manner that the pillow-case mouths are,
all of them, turned away from anyone entering the ward's door. Similarly
the overlap of the counterpanes must all be of exactly the same depth
and caught up at exactly the same angle, the resulting series of pairs
of triangles all ending at exactly the same spot in each bedstead. These
trifles reveal at a glance the professional touch in a ward, and are, I
understand, not by any means the insignia of a military as distinct from
a civilian hospital. They may or may not contribute to the comfort of
the patient, but they betoken the captaincy of one whose methodicalness
will in other and less visible respects most emphatically benefit him.
Our hut life was something more than a mere folding-up of bedding on
bedsteads and great-coats on shelves. After midday dinner it was
allowable to unroll the mattress, make the bed, and rest thereon--which
most of us by that time (having been on the run since 6 o'clock parade)
were very ready to do. There was half an hour to spare before 2 o'clock
parade, and a precious half-hour it was. Snores rose from some of the
beds where students of the war had collapsed beneath the newspapers
which they had meant to read. Desultory conversation enlivened those
corners where the denizens of the hut were energetic enough to polish
their boots or sew on buttons. The one or two men who happened to be
"going out on pass"--we were allowed one afternoon per week--were
putting on their puttees and brushing-up the metal buttons of their
walking-out tunics (otherwise known as their Square Push Suits). The
buttons of their working tunics had of course been burnished before
parade. The correct employment of button-sticks and of the magic cleaner
called Soldier's Friend; the polishing of one's out-of-use boots and
their placing, on the floor, with tied laces, and with their toes in
line with the bed's legs; the substitution of lost braces' buttons by
"bulldogs"; the furbishing of one's belt; the propping-up of the front
of one's cap with wads of paper in the interior of the crown; the
devices whereby non-spiral puttees can be coaxed into a resemblance of
spiral ones and caused to ascend in corkscrews above trousers which
refuse to tuck unlumpily into one's socks--these, and a host of other
matters, always kept a proportion of the hut-dwellers awake and busy and
loquacious even in the somnolent post-prandial half-hour before 2
o'clock.
But it was at night, at bedtime, that the hut became generally sociable.
Lights-Out sounded at 10.15; and at 10.10 we were all scrambling into
our pyjamas. In winter our disrobing was hasty; in summer it was an
affair of leisure, and deshabille roamings to and fro in the aisle, and
gossip. When the bugle blew and the electric lights suddenly ceased to
glow, leaving the hut in a darkness broken only by the dim shapes of the
windows and the red of cigarette-ends, many of us still had to complete
our undressing. We became adepts at doing this in the dark and so
disposing of the articles of our attire that they could be instantly
retrieved in the morning. Once between the blankets, conversation at
first waxed rather than waned. The Night Wardmaster, whose duty it was
to make the round of the orderlies' huts, disapproved of conversation
after Lights-Out, and was apt to say so, loudly and menacingly, when he
surprised us by popping his head in at the door. But--well--the Night
Wardmaster always departed in the long run.... And then uprose, between
bed and bed, those unconclusive debates in which the masculine soul
delighteth: Theology; Woman; Victuals; Politics; Art; the Press; Sport;
Marriage; Money--and sometimes even The War; likewise the purely local
topics of Sisters and their Absurdities; Our Officers; The Other Huts;
What the Sergeant-Major Said; Why V.A.D.'s can't replace Male Orderlies;
What this Morning's Operations Looked Like; Whether an Officers' Ward or
a Men's Ward is the nicer; Who Deserves Stripes; C.O.'s Parade and its
Terrors; Advantages of Volunteering for Night Duty; The Cushy Job of
being in charge of a Sham Lunacy Case; Other Cushy Jobs less cushy than
They Sounded; and so forth; until at last protests began to be voiced by
the wearier folk who wanted silence.
Silence it was, except for the thunder of occasional passing trains in
the near-by railway cutting. These had little power to disturb. Tucked
in the brown army blankets, which at first sight look so hard and so
prickly, we slumbered, the twenty-one of us, as one man; until, with a
cruel jolt, at 5.15 that wretched alarm-clock crashed forth its summons
for the fastidious few who liked to rise in ample time to bath and shave
before early parade. Sometimes I was of that virtuous band, and
sometimes I wasn't; but, either way, I hated the alarm-clock at
5.15,--though not so virulently as did those members of the hut who
never by any chance dreamt of rising until five to six. These gentry had
reduced the ritual of dressing, and of rolling up their bedding, to a
speed at which it might almost be compared to expert juggling: the
quickness of the hand deceived the eye. At five minutes to six you would
see the juggler asleep on his pillow, in blissful innocence; at six he
would be on parade, as correctly attired as you were yourself, and
having left behind him, in the hut, a bed as neatly folded as yours. The
world is sprinkled with people who can do this kind of thing--and our
hut was blessed with its due leaven of them. But I would not assert that
they _never_ had to put some finishing touches, either to their dress
or to their hut equipment foldings, before the Company Officer's tour of
inspection at 8.30. It sufficed that they would pass muster at 6
o'clock, when appearances are less minutely important. And the man who
never rises till 5.55 detests an alarm-clock that whirrs at 5.15. The
hour at which the alarm-clock should be set to detonate was one of our
few acrimonious subjects of argument: I have even known it upset a
discussion on Woman. But the early risers had their way, and the clock
continued to be set for half an hour in front of Réveillé.
The harsh vibration of the alarm at one end of the day, and the expiry
of the Lights-Out talks at the other--these events marked the chief
time-divisions in our hut life. While we were absent at work, our
interests were many and scattered; but the hut was a nucleus for
communal bonds of union which evoked no little loyalty and affection
from us all. On the May morning when I first beheld that corrugated-iron
abode I thought it looked inviting enough; but I did not guess how fond
I was to grow of its barn-like interior and of the sportive crew who
shared its mathematically-allotted floor-space. "Next war," one optimist
suggested during a typical Lights-Out séance, "let's all enlist together
again." There were protests against the implied prophecy, but none
against the proposition as such. That is the spirit of hut comradeship
... a spirit which no alarm-clock controversies can do aught to impair;
for though 5.15 a.m. is an hour to test the temper of a troop of
twenty-one saints, 10.15 p.m. will bring geniality and garrulousness to
twenty-one sinners.
III
WASHING-UP
The following substances (to which I had previously been almost a
stranger) absorbed much of my interest during my first months as a
hospital orderly:
Coagulated pudding, mutton fat and beef fat, cold gravy, treacle,
congealed cocoa, suet duff, skins of once hot milk:
Plates, cups, frying-pans and other utensils smeared with the above:
Knives, forks and spoons, ditto.
I am fated to go through life, in the future, not merely with an exalted
opinion of scullery-maids--this I should not regret--but also with an
only too clear picture, when at the dinner table, of the adventures of
each dish of broken meats on its exit from view. I have been behind the
scenes at the business of eating, or rather, at the dreadful repairs
which must be instituted when the business of eating is concluded in
order that the business of eating may recommence.
There were days when the ward-kitchen was to me a battlefield and I
seemed to be fighting on the losing side. This was when our scrub-lady
was ill or had "got the sack" and it fell to me, the orderly, to do the
washing-up single-handed. Those patients who were well enough to be on
their feet were supposed to help. (I speak of a men's ward, of course,
not an officers'.) They did help, and that right willingly. Sometimes I
was blessed by the presence of a patient with a passion for cleaning
things. When there were no dishes to clean he would clean taps. When the
taps shone like gold he would clean the hooks on the dresser. When all
our kitchen gear was clean he would invade, with a kind of fury, the
sink-room and clean the apparatus there. When this was done he would
clean the ward's windows and door handles. Between-times he would clean
his boots and shave patients in bed. The new army is thickly sown with
men like that. They are the salt of the earth. I would place them at the
summit of the commonwealth's salary list, the bank clerk second, and the
business man, the artist and the politician at the bottom. At all events
these were my sentiments when a patient of this type, convalescing,
began to be able to help me with my kitchen chores. But it occasionally
chanced that every single patient in the ward was confined to bed. It
was then that I made my most intimate acquaintance with the catalogue of
horrors I have cited.
You behold me, with my shirt-sleeves rolled up, faced by a heap of
twenty plates, twenty forks, twenty knives and twenty spoons, all
urgently requiring washing. Were these my whole task I should not
shrink. They would be nicely polished-off long ere one-fifteen
arrived--the time when I should (but probably shall not be able to)
leave for my own meal in the orderlies' mess. But there are two far more
serious opponents waiting to be subdued--the dinner-tin and the
pudding-basin. This pair are hateful beyond words. Their memory will
for ever haunt me, a spectral disillusionment to spoil the relish of
every repast I may consume in the years that are ahead.
The dinner-tin was a rectangular box some three feet long, twenty inches
wide and six inches deep. It was made of solid metal, was fitted with a
false bottom to contain hot water, and was divided internally into three
compartments to hold meat, vegetables and duff. These viands were loaded
into the tin at the hospital's central kitchen. I had naught to do with
the cookery--which I may mention always seemed to me to be excellent. My
sole concern was with the helping-out of the food to the patients and
the restoration of the dinner-tin to its shelf in the central kitchen.
For unless I restored that tin in a faultless state of cleanliness, the
sergeant in charge of the central kitchen would require my blood. The
tin's number would betray me. The sergeant needed not to know my name:
all he had to do, on discovering the questionable tin, was to glance at
its number and then send for the orderly of the ward with a
corresponding number.
He was a sergeant whose aspect could be very daunting. I never had to
come before him on the subject of a dirty dinner-tin. But he and I had
some small passages concerning "specials" (separate diets ordered for
patients requiring delicacies). Sometimes the necessary forms for the
specials had been incorrectly made out by a Sister with no head for army
accuracy in minor clerical details. Thereafter it was my unlucky place
to see the sergeant, and put the matter straight with him. I have
survived those encounters. I have survived them with an enhanced respect
for the sergeant and the organisation of his large and by no means
simple department. There were moments, nevertheless, when I approached
his presence with a sinking heart. For if I failed to "get round" him in
the matter of coaxing another special for a patient, there was Sister to
placate on my return to the ward; and it was quite impossible to
persuade Sister that she could have made a mistake with her diet sheets,
or, if she had, that it was of any consequence.
The dinner-tin was somewhat larger than the sink in which I was supposed
to wash it. It was also very heavy. When full of food, and its false
bottom charged with hot water, I could only just lift it, and my
progress down the ward, carrying it from the trolley in the corridor to
the ward-kitchen, was a perilous and perspiring shuffle. As soon as all
the patients had been served I placed any left-over slices of meat in
the larder: these would be eaten at tea. Then I drained out the hot
water from the false bottom. Then (but only after experience had given
me wisdom) I ran hot water from the geyser tap into the now empty meat,
vegetable and duff compartments, and gave them a hurried swill: this to
rid them of the pestilent dregs of fatty material which would otherwise
have dried and glued themselves to the floor of the tin. The latter had
now to be put on one side, for I must be back in the ward attending to
my diners. Only when they had finished their meal, and their bed-tables
had been removed, folded up and placed neatly behind each bed, could I
tackle the tin in earnest.
I abhor dabbling in grease; but life is full of abhorrent dilemmas which
must be endured; and the interior of that dinner-tin somehow got itself
cleaned, every day, in the long run. During the early part of any given
week I was almost happy over the job. For Monday was "Dry Store" day. On
Monday, and on Monday only--and you were helpless for the remainder of
the week if you forgot the rule--you could obtain, on presentation of a
chit, blacklead for the stoves, metal-polish for the brass, rags for
cleaning the floor, floor-polish, one box of matches, bath-brick, soft
soap, and--soda. It is an extraordinary chemical, soda. Before I became
a ward orderly I had no idea of the remarkable properties of soda. A
handful of soda in boiling water, and behold the grease dissolve meekly
from the nastiest dinner-tin! It was miraculous. When a pitying
scrub-lady first showed me the trick I thought that all my troubles were
at an end. Soda made the ward-kitchen seem like heaven. Alas, the
supply of soda considered sufficient by the Dry Store authorities never
lasted beyond Wednesday. On Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday the
dinner-tin had to be cleaned out not by alkaline agency, but by sheer
slogging hard labour. And when at last I stood it on edge to dry, and
thought to go off duty with a clear conscience, I generally found that I
had overlooked the waiting pudding-basin.
On the whole I am inclined to pronounce the pudding-basin a more
obdurate utensil than even the dinner-tin. The pudding-basin, however,
only appeared every second morning. On duff days (duff being served in
the same tin as the meat and vegetables, though in a separate
compartment) we had no pudding. By pudding I mean milk pudding--rice or
sago or tapioca. Now a milk pudding, such as those my patients received,
though perhaps it was looked askance at in the nursery, is food which,
as an adult, I am far from despising. Rice pudding I have come with
maturer years to regard as a delicacy. Sago and tapioca I still eat
rather with amiable resignation than from choice. But any milk pudding,
as I now know, has a most vicious habit of cleaving to the dish in which
it was cooked. Rice is the least evil offender. The others are
absolutely wicked. To clean oleaginous scum from a dinner-tin is not
easy, but it is a mere bagatelle compared with cleaning the scorched
high-tide-mark of tapioca or sago from the shores of a large metal
pudding-basin. I have tried scraping with a knife blade, I have tried
every reasonable form of friction, and I can simply state as a fact from
my own personal experience (perhaps I am unfortunate) that those metal
pudding-basins of ours would frequently yield to nothing less powerful
than sandpaper.
I need scarcely say that sandpaper was not supplied by the deities of
the Dry Store. Sandpaper did not come within their purview. It had no
recognised use in hospital. Therefore it did not exist. But, observing
that a succession of metal pudding-basins would be an insupportable
prospect without sandpaper, I laid in a stock of sandpaper, paying for
the same out of my own private purse. It was a cheap investment. Never
have earnings of mine been better spent. Moreover, having once hit on
the notion of giving myself a lift illegitimately, so to speak, I added
to the smuggling-in of sandpaper a secret purchase of soda. Except that
our scrub-ladies, each and all, discovering that the Dry Store's
allowance of this priceless chemical had at last apparently been
generous, caused it to fly at a disconcerting pace, and as a result
sometimes left me short of it, my career as a washer-up afterwards
became more comfortable.
I shall never like washing-up. In the communal households of the future
I shall heave coal, sift cinders, dig potatoes, dust furniture or scour
floors--any task will be mine which, though it makes me dirty, does not
make me greasily dirty. But if I must wash-up, if I must study the
idiosyncrasies of cold fat, treacly plates, frying-pans which have
sizzled dripping-toast on the gas-ring, frozen gravy, and pudding-basins
with burnt milk-skins filmed to their sides, I shall be comparatively
undismayed. For sandpaper is not yet (like the news posters) abolished;
and soda--although I hear its price has risen several hundred per
cent.--is still cheaper than, say, diamonds.
IV
A "HUT" HOSPITAL
People have curious ideas of the kind of building which would make a
good war hospital. "The So-and-So Club in Pall Mall," I have been told,
"should have been commandeered long ago. Ideal for hospital purposes. Of
course some of the M.P. members brought influence to bear, and the War
Office was choked off...." And so forth.
It would surprise me to hear of anything that the War Office was held
back from doing if it wanted to do it. Perhaps the least likely
obstructionist to be successful in this project would be a
club-frequenting M.P. The War Office has taken exactly and precisely
what it chose--even when it would have been better to choose otherwise.
In this matter of commandeering buildings for hospitals it may or may
not have acted with wisdom; but at least it has been safe in avoiding
the advice of the individual who jumps to the conclusion that just any
pleasingly-situated edifice will do, provided beds and nurses are
shovelled into it in sufficient quantities.
The indignant patriot who was convinced that chicane alone saved the
So-and-So Club from being dedicated to the service of the wounded was
quite unable to tell me whether the lifts--assuming that lifts
existed--were roomy enough to accommodate stretchers; whether, if so, no
interval of stairs prevented trollies from being wheeled to every ward;
whether the arrangement of the building would allow of the network of
plumbing necessitated by the introduction of numerous bathrooms and
lavatories (for each ward must possess both); whether the kitchens were
so located that they could supply food to top-floor patients without
waste of carrying labour on the part of the orderlies' staff. These
problems, the mere fringe of the subject, had never occurred to our
patriot. His idea of a hospital was a place where soldiers lie in bed
and get well. (What queer notions visitors absorb of the _easiness_ of
hospital life!) He had not glimpsed the organisation which made the cure
possible. The man in bed, a Sister hovering in the background with,
apparently, nothing to do but look pleasant--these constituted, for him,
the final phenomena of a war hospital. These phenomena, instead of being
housed in a wood-and-corrugated-iron shed, might have been staged
picturesquely in one of the luxurious salons of the So-and-So Club in
Pall Mall. It was a shame that they weren't. He would write to the
papers about it. Somebody must be blamed, somebody must be made to
hustle. And meanwhile the Sisters and doctors who _were_ installed in
gorgeous mansions for their work were openly envying the fortunate ones
who had been given those bare but efficient and compactly-planned sheds.
Some years ago a number of public buildings were earmarked for hospital
use in case of war. It may surprise the indignant patriots to learn that
any preparations whatever were made prior to the outbreak in 1914.
Nevertheless all kinds of preparations actually were made. Mistakes and
miscalculations may have marred those preparations: the fact remains
that, as far as the Territorial Medical Service was concerned, the
authorities had merely to press a button and hospitals came into
existence. Thus a number of institutions--mostly schools--found
themselves ejected from their own roof-trees: found, in short, (what
many other folk were to learn later) that the State is omnipotent in
war-time and that sectional interests fade into insignificance compared
with the interests of the safety of the commonwealth. Some conception of
the promptness with which this paper scheme of Sir Alfred Keogh's
materialised at the outbreak of war may be gathered from the simple
statement that the building of which I myself write was an Orphans' Home
on August 4th, 1914. At 6 a.m. on August 5th it was a military hospital.
I do not say that it was a military hospital in working order. But if,
by a miracle, wounded _had_ turned up then, there was at least a staff
of medical officers and orderlies on the premises to receive them. In
point of fact it was some weeks before the first patients arrived. Those
weeks, however, were not idle ones. The layman who considers that any
large building can be turned instantaneously into a hospital would have
had an eye-opener if he had witnessed the work done here. The mere
removing of 95 per cent. of the institution's furniture was a colossal
task; added thereto was the introduction of hundreds of beds, hundreds
of mattresses, hundreds of sets of bedclothes, hundreds of suits of
pyjamas, hundreds of--But why prolong a brain-racking list? Then there
was the pulling-down and fixing-up of partitions, the removal of every
single window for replacement by Hopper sashes, the fitting-in of
bathrooms, lavatories, ward-kitchens, sink-rooms, dispensary, cookhouse,
operating-theatre, pathological laboratory, linen-store, steward's
store, clothing-store, detention-room, administration offices, X-ray
department ... all these in a building which, spacious and handsome
outwardly, was, as to its interior, a characteristic maze in the
Scottish baronial style of architecture beloved by mid-Victorian
philanthropists. How the evicted orphans will like to return to those
stone-flagged passages and large airy dormitories, after having
experienced the comforts of the banal but snug suburban villas in which
they are at present located, I know not. There is a certain dignity
about the Scottish baronial pile, I admit. The silhouette of its grey
stone façade, rising above delightful lawns, makes a good
impression--from a distance. Postcard views of it sell freely to
visitors. But the best part of our hospital is hidden behind that
turreted façade, and is much too "ugly" and utilitarian for postcard
immortalisation.
The best part of our hospital--_the_ hospital, to most of us--came into
being when the commandeered Scottish baronial orphans' asylum was found
to be too small. Then were built "the huts."
The word "hut" suggests something casual, of the camping-out order: a
shed knocked together with tin-tacks, doubtfully weather-proof and
probably scamped by profiteering contractors. Of the huts provided at
certain training centres this may have been true. The finely austere
and efficient ranks of hut-wards which constitute the main part of the
3rd London General Hospital are the very antithesis of that picture.
They may look flimsy. They were certainly put up at a remarkable pace. I
myself witnessed the erection of the final fifty of them. An open field
vanished in less than a month, and "Bungalow Town" (as someone nicknamed
it) appeared. You would have said that such speed meant countless
imperfections of detail. No doubt some tinkerings and modifications were
bound to follow, when the regiment of workmen, carpenters, engineers,
drainage specialists, electricians, had vanished. But, in the long run,
the ideal hospital remained--a hospital with which the So-and-So Club in
Pall Mall, for all its luxuriousness, could never hope to compare.
There are still a dozen wards--used mostly for medical cases--in the
Scottish baronial building. Its rooms, too, provide the Administration
with offices. Its great Dining Hall is a splendid Receiving Ward for the
sorting-out and clearance of newly-arrived convoys of patients. We
should be poorly situated indeed if we had not our Scottish baronial
main building to be the hub of the hospital's activities, or rather the
handle from which springs the fan of the hospital's great extension--the
huts. Approaching the hospital the visitor sees nothing of those huts.
As he walks up the drive he flatters himself that he has reached his
destination. He discovers his mistake when, at the inquiry bureau in the
entrance, he is informed that the patient whom he has come to interview
is (say) in "C 13." He is advised to go down the passage on his left,
turn to his right, turn to the left again and then again to the
right--after which he had better seek a further re-direction. Launching
himself optimistically on this voyage he learns, long ere he has
attained his goal, that a modern war-hospital can hide a considerable
extent of pedestrianism behind a comparatively short Scottish baronial
frontage. He will be fortunate if five minutes' steady tramping brings
him to the bedside of his friend in C 13.