empty once more. The four ranks of beds, without a crease on their brown
blankets, are bare of occupants. The Sister and her probationers have
vanished. The Pack Store orderlies have carried off their loot of dirty
khaki tunics and trousers for the fumigator. The clerical V.A.D.'s have
gone to enter "particulars" in ledgers and card-indices. The cookhouse
people have removed their cocoa urn. The sergeant is inspecting the
metal ward-tickets left in his rack. A glance at them tells him how many
beds, and which beds, are free in the hospital; for the tickets have no
duplicates; any given ticket can only reappear in the rack when the bed
which it connotes is out of use and awaiting a newcomer; the ticket
hangs from a nail in the wall beside the patient's bed just so long as
that bed is tenanted. So the rack of metal tickets might almost take the
place of that important document, of which a freshly-compiled edition is
typed every morning, the Empty Bed List; and the sergeant is meditative
as he sorts into the rack the tickets which have newly been sent in from
the Sisters of wards where there have been departures. "Not much room in
the eye-wound wards," he ponders; or, "A lot of empties in the
medicals." And then ... the tinkle of the telephone....
"Another convoy expected at 6.15? Twenty walking-cases and seventeen
cots. Right you are!"
And at 6.15 the party of orderlies will be back again at the front door,
again the motor-cars will stream up the drive, again the ambulances will
come with their stretchers, and again the receiving hall will awaken
from its interlude of silence to echo with the activities incidental to
a clearing house of those damaged human bundles which are the _raison
d'être_ of our great war-hospital.
VII
"T.... A...."
War-hospital patients are of many sorts. It is a common mistake of the
arm-chair newspaper devourer to lump all soldiers together as quaint,
bibulous, aitch-dropping innocents, lamblike and gauche in
drawing-rooms, fierce and picturesque on the field, who (to judge by
their published photographs) are continually on the grin and continually
shaking hands either with each other or with equally grinsome French
peasant women at cottage doors or with the local mayor who congratulates
them on the glorious V.C.'s which, of course, they are continually
winning. In a war hospital that harbours many thousands of patients per
annum, we should know, in the long run, something about the
characteristics of Tommy Atkins; and it is with resentment that I hear
him thus classified as a mere type. He is not a type. Discipline and
training have given him some veneer of generalised similarities. Beneath
these, Tommy Atkins is simply the man in the street--any man in any
street; and if you look out of your window in the city and see a throng
of pedestrians upon the pavement you might just as well say that because
they are all civilians they are all alike as that, because all soldiers
wear khaki, they are all alike.
I have a quarrel with the Press on the score of its persistent fostering
of this notion that "our gallant lads" (as the sentimental scribe calls
them) are a pack of children about whose exploits an unfailing stream of
semi-pathetic, semi-humorous anecdotes must be put forth. Even the old
professional army exhibited no dead level either of blackguards on the
one hand or humble Galahads on the other. But whatever may have been the
case before the war, all the armies of Europe are now alike in this,
that they are composed of civilians who merely happen to have adopted a
certain garb for the performance of a certain job--and, be it remarked,
a temporary job. That garb has not reduced the citizens, who have the
honour to wear it, to a monotonous level either of intelligence or of
conduct: nor even of opinions about the war itself. I have had
fire-eaters in my ward who breathed the sentiments of _John Bull_ and
the _Evening News_, and I have had pacifists (they seemed to have fought
no less bravely) who, week by week, read and approved Mr. Snowden in the
_Labour Leader_; I have had Radicals and Tories, and patients who cared
for neither party, but whose passion was cage-birds or boxing or amateur
photography; I have had patients who were sulky and patients who were
bright, patients who were unlettered and patients who were educated,
patients who could hardly express themselves without the use of an
ensanguined vocabulary and patients who were gently spoken and
fastidious. Each of them was Tommy Atkins--the inanely smirking hero of
the picture-paper and the funny paragraph. Neither his picture nor the
paragraph may be positively a lie, and yet, when the arm-chair dweller
chucklingly draws attention to them, I am tempted to relapse into
irreverence and utter one or other (or perhaps both) of two phrases
which T. Atkins is himself credited with using _ad nauseam_--"Na-poo"
and "I _don't_ think."
When I assert--as I do unhesitatingly assert--that no one could work in
a war-hospital ward for any length of time without an ever-deepening
respect and fondness for Tommy Atkins, it is the same thing as asserting
that the respect and fondness are evoked by close contact with one's
countrymen: nothing more nor less. A hospital ward is a haphazard
selection of one's fellow-Britons: the most wildly haphazard it is
possible to conceive. And the pessimistic cynic who, after a sojourn in
that changing company for a month or two can still either generalise
about them or (if he does) can still not acknowledge that in the mass
they are amazingly lovable, is beyond hope. The war has taught its
lessons to us all, and none more important than this. For myself I
confess that I never knew before how nice were nine out of ten of the
individuals with whom I sat silent in trains, whom I glanced at in
business offices or behind counters, whom I saw in workshops or in the
field or who were my neighbours in music-halls. They were strangers. In
the years to come I hope they will be strangers no longer. For they and
I have dressed alike and borne the same surname--Atkins.
Of course, there remain a few generalisations which _can_ safely be
risked about even so nondescript a person as the new Tommy Atkins. As
practically all the Tommy Atkinses are, at this moment, concentrated on
the prosecution of one great job, it is natural that their main
interests should revolve round that job. They all (for instance) want
the job to be finished. They all (within my experience) want it to be
finished well. They nearly all desire earnestly to cease soldiering as
soon as the job _is_ finished well. I never yet met the man (though he
may exist, outside the brains of the scribes aforementioned) who, having
tasted the joys of roughing it, is determined not to return to a humdrum
desk in an office: on the contrary, that office and that humdrum desk
have now become this travelled adventurer's most roseate dream. I have
conversed with patients drawn from nearly every walk in life, and I do
not remember one who definitely spoke of refusing to go back to his
former work--if he could get it.
One of my patients had been a subterranean lavatory attendant. You would
have thought his ambitions--after visits to Egypt, Malta, the
Dardanelles and France--might have soared to loftier altitudes. He had
survived hair-raising adventures; he had taken part in the making of
history; although wounded he had not been incapacitated for an active
career in the future; and he was neither illiterate nor unintelligent.
Yet he told me, with obvious satisfaction, that his place was being kept
open for him. I was, as it were, invited to rejoice with him over the
destiny which was his. I may add that the singular revelations which he
imparted as to the opportunities for extra earnings in his troglodyte
trade extorted from me a more enthusiastic sympathy than might be
supposed possible.
That agreeable domestic pet, _homo sapiens_, remains unchanged even when
you dress him up in a uniform and set him fighting. He is always
consistently inconsistent; he is always both reasonable and
unreasonable. You can try to cast him in a mould, but he resumes his
normal shapelessness the moment the mould is removed. Expose him to
frightful ordeals of terror and pain, and he will emerge grumbling about
some petty grievance or carrying on a flirtation with another man's wife
or squabbling about sectarian dogmas or gambling on magazine
competitions or planning new businesses--in fact, behaving precisely as
the natural lord of creation always does behave. No member of our
hospital staff, I imagine, will ever forget the arrival of the first
batch of exchanged British wounded prisoners; It was the most tragic
scene I have ever witnessed. It is a fact, for which I make no apology,
that tears were shed by some of those whose task it was to welcome that
pitiful band of martyrs. We had received convoys of wounded many a time,
but _these_ broken creatures, so pale, so neglected, so thin and so
infinitely happy to be free once more, had a poignant appeal which must
have melted the most rigid official. (And we are neither very official,
here, nor very rigid.) Well, amongst these liberated captives was one
who told a sad tale of starvation at his internment camp. There is
little doubt that it was a true tale, in the main. On that I make no
comment. I simply introduce you to this gentleman, who had been restored
to his native land after ten months of entombment, in order to mention
that on the following morning, when his breakfast was placed before him,
he turned up his nose at it. Loudly complaining of the poorness of the
food, he leant out of bed, picked up a brown-paper parcel which had been
his only luggage, and produced from it some German salted herring, which
he proceeded to eat with grumbling gusto.
That is not specially Tommy Atkins; it is _homo sapiens_ of the
hearthside, whether in suburban villa or in slum, for ever dissatisfied
(more especially with his victuals) and for ever evoking our affection
all the same.
No; Tommy Atkins is never twice alike. He is unanimous on few debatable
matters. One of them, as I have said, is the desirability of finishing
the war--in the proper way. (But even here there are differences as to
what constitutes the proper way.) Another is (I trust I shall not shock
the reader) the extreme displeasingness of life at the front. I would
not say that our hospital patients are positively thankful to be
wounded, nor that they do not wish to recover with reasonable rapidity.
But that they are glad to be safe in England once more is undeniable.
The more honour to them that few, if any, flinch from returning to
duty--when they know only too well what that duty consists of. But they
make no bones about their opinion. Not long ago I was the conductor of a
party of convalescents who went to a special matinée of a military
drama. The theatre was entirely filled with wounded soldiers from
hospitals, plus a few nurses and orderlies. It was an inspiring sight.
The drama went well, and its patriotic touches received their due meed
of applause. But when the heroine, in a moving passage, declared that
she had never met a wounded British soldier who was not eager to get
back to the front, there arose, in an instant, a spontaneous shout of
laughter from the whole audience. That was Tommy Atkins unanimous for
once.
He was unanimous too, I should add, in perceiving immediately that the
actress had been disconcerted by his roar of amusement. The poor girl's
emotional speech had been ruined. She looked blank and stood irresolute.
At once a burst of hand-clapping took the place of the laughter. It was
not ironical, it was friendly and apologetic. "Go ahead!" it said.
"We're sorry. Those lines aren't your fault, anyway. You spoke them very
prettily, and it was a shame to laugh. But the ass of a playwright
hadn't been in the trenches, and if your usual audiences relish that
kind of speech they haven't been there either."
So much for Tommy Atkins in his unanimous mood--unanimously condemning
cant and at the same time unanimously courteous. Now that I come to
reflect I believe that, in his best moments, these are perhaps the only
two points concerning which Tommy Atkins _is_ unanimous. Whether he
lives up to them or not (and to expect him unflinchingly to live up to
them in season and out of season is about as sensible as to expect him
perpetually to live up to the photographs and anecdotes), we may take
them as his ideal. He dislikes humbug: he tries to be polite. Could one
sketch a sounder scaffolding on which to build all the odd
divergencies--crankinesses and heroisms, stupidities and
engagingnesses--which may go to make the edifice of an average decent
soul's material, mental and spiritual habitation?
* * * * *
_Postscript._--An expert--one of England's greatest experts--who has
read the above tells me that I have not done justice to the old
professional army men of Mons and the Aisne. When wounded and in our
hospital they _did_ want to go back to fight. But their sole reason,
given with frankness, was that they considered they were needed: the new
army, in training, was not ready: it would be murder to send the new
army out, unprepared, to such an ordeal.
This authority, who has interviewed many thousands of convalescents,
further remarked: "The wounded man who has been under shell fire and who
professes to be eager to go back, whether ordered or no, is a liar. On
the other hand, the scrim-shankers who try to get out of going back,
when they should go back, are an amazingly small minority."
VIII
LAUNDRY PROBLEMS
A number of oddly unmasculine duties fell to the lot of the R.A.M.C.
orderly prior to the time when "V.A.D.'s" were allowed to take his place
(at least to some extent) throughout our English war-hospitals. One of
my first tasks in the morning was the collecting and classification of
my ward's dirty linen. The work cannot be called difficult. It would be
an exaggeration to say that it demands a supreme intellectual effort.
But to the male mind it is, at least, rather novel. The average bachelor
has perhaps been accustomed to scrutinise his collars, handkerchiefs and
underclothes before and after their trips to the laundry. He has seldom,
I think, had intimate trafficking with pillow-cases, sheets,
counterpanes and tablecloths. In the reckoning of these he is apt to
make mistakes and to lapse into a casualness which, in a woman familiar
with household routine, would be improbable. "Sister's" sharpest
reproofs were called forth by errors made in connection with this daily
exchange of clean for dirty linen.
A form, of course, had to be filled in. (The army provides a form
for everything.) This form presents a catalogue of eighty-one
separate items, from "Blankets" ("Child's," "Infant's"--I do not
know what is the difference between them, and I never had to deal with
either--"G.S."--whatever that may be--and "White") to "Waist-coats,
Strait." It distinguishes between ten kinds of "Cases"--pillow-cases,
paillasse-cases, and the like: for example, there are "barrack"
bolster-cases and "hospital" bolster-cases; and you must not confound
"hospital" mattress-cases with "officers'" mattress-cases. You are
misled if you imagine that the heading "Cases" has exhausted the
possibilities which appeared to be latent in that noun; for, in addition
to the ten unqualified "Cases" there are seven more, defined as "Cases,
slip." Can you wonder that the orderly, presented with a bin-full of
confused and crumpled objects ready for the wash, and told to count them
and enter their numbers in the appointed columns, occasionally made a
wrong guess? Then there were eight sorts of "Cloths"--tablecloth,
tray-cloth, distinctive cloth, and so forth. (To how many lay minds does
"distinctive cloth" convey any meaning?) Counterpanes you would think to
be obvious enough; but that remarkable compilation, the _Check Book for
Hospital Linen_ ("Printed for H.M. Stationery Office...." etc.),
recognises four varieties. It also allows for four varieties of sheets,
four of aprons and four of trousers. Of towels it knows six.
Each ward has a certain stock of linen in its cupboard. That stock can
only be kept at the proper level by strict barter of a soiled object for
a clean duplicate of the same object. As there are three hundred and
sixty-five days in the year on which this transaction occurs, and sixty
wards' bundles of linen to be dealt with by both the Dirty Linen
Department and the Clean Linen Department on each of those days, it is
clear that exactitude in the filling-in of the form aforementioned
becomes an affair of almost nightmare importance. Bring back from the
Clean Linen Store three dusters instead of the four dusters which you
previously handed in at the Dirty Linen Store, and your cupboard will,
to the end of time, be short of one duster which it should have
possessed. Even if Sister fails to pounce promptly on the evidence of
the loss, the quartermaster's dread stocktaking will ultimately find you
out. Your cupboard declines to correspond with his book-entries. And
there is trouble brewing, in consequence. (But indeed, if the loss of a
single duster were the sole crime revealed on stocktaking day, you would
be fortunate.)
The orderly, with an obese bundle of washing on his back, plods from the
ward to the Dirty Linen Store at quarter to nine every morning. I say he
"plods" because the bundle is generally too heavy for transportation at
a rapid pace. Twenty sheets are usually but a part of the bundle; and
twenty sheets are alone no light burden. Between his teeth--both his
hands being occupied with the balancing of the bundle--he carries his
chit: that indispensable list. Arrived at the store he dumps the bundle
on the ground, opens it, and pitches its contents piecemeal over a
counter to one of the staff of the store. One by one the objects are
named and counted aloud, as they fly across the counter, the staff
orderly simultaneously checking the list and keeping an eye on what he
is receiving. For we may, by guile, palm off on him one sheet as two. It
can be done, by means of a certain legerdemain which comes with
practice. Or we may have received from the Dry Store, amongst the rags
meant for cleaning purposes, a couple of quite worn-out socks, not a
pair, and long past placing on human feet: these derelicts, with a rapid
motion, can be passed over the counter amongst the good socks, and only
later in the day will the Dirty Linen Store officials detect the
fraud--when it is impossible to locate its perpetrator. The
store-orderly's job is therefore one requiring some astuteness: his
checking of the list has to be achieved at a high speed and in the midst
of a babel; for as many ward-orderlies are present as the length of the
counter will accommodate, and they are all getting rid of their
dirty-linen bundles at the tops of their voices.
Altercations, I am afraid, were not infrequent in the epoch when the
actors in this drama were of the male sex. (Even now, when the scene is
mainly feminine, I believe differences of opinion continue to arise, but
doubtless the language in which they are conducted is seemlier if no
less deadly.) The store-orderly had a marvellous eye for the difference
between two kinds of shirts which are worn by our patients. One kind has
a pleat in the back, the other kind hasn't; and I confess I occasionally
transposed them, on the form. It was fatal to do so. There was a
separate line for each brand of shirt and there must be a separate
entry. The store-orderly's trained powers of observation could see that
pleat, or the absence of it, even as the shirt slid across his line of
vision in a torrent of other shirts. His hand shot out and grabbed it
back from joining the heap on the floor within the counter. His pencil
poised itself from the ticking-off of the items on the form. "Wrong
again!" he would cry, sometimes in anguish and sometimes in anger. And
there was nothing for it but to apologise. To keep on good terms with
the various orderlies in the various stores was the secret of making
one's life worth living--a secret even profounder than that of keeping
on good terms with Sister: to be sure it was (though she seldom realised
it) the very foundation of the art of keeping on good terms with her.
You could not even begin to please Sister unless, at the end of those
incessant journeyings of yours which she did not see, you had dealings
with store-orderlies who were obliging and who would give you the things
which the taskmistress had sent you to fetch (or would drop a kindly
hint as to where and by what means you could acquire them). The Dirty
Linen Store orderly who declined to accept your plea for forgiveness
when you had been obtuse enough to see a fomentation-wringer in a
teacloth, could devastate the harmony of a whole forenoon. A sweet
reasonableness was undoubtedly the note to strike when such a
contretemps occurred.
Having got quit of the last item in your bundle, you returned to the
ward to attend to other (and generally less entertaining) duties until
such time as it was proper to repair to the Clean Linen Store. The staff
of the Clean Linen Store, a huge department whose system of book-keeping
is enough to make the brain reel (for here sheets, etc., are dealt with
not in dozens but in thousands), had in the interim received your chit
from their colleagues of the Dirty Linen Store. These latter, rashly or
otherwise, had guaranteed its accuracy by initialing it. Accordingly, in
the Clean Linen Store, a fresh bundle was ready for your acceptance, its
contents consisting of duplicates of the objects now on their way to the
laundry.
It was unwise, however, to accept this neatly folded and virginal bundle
without investigation. It might contain what the chit demanded; or it
might not. Before you could carry it off you must yourself initial, and
finally bid farewell to, the chit: thereby certifying that you had got
what you claimed. To make sure of this you would be well advised to undo
the bundle, and (as far as was practicable in a jostling crowd of
fellow-orderlies similarly employed) run through the whole of its
contents, computing them with precision: twenty sheets, twelve
pillow-cases, nine bolster-cases--it is only too easy to miss the
difference in the sizes of these--seventeen hand-towels, two
operating-aprons, eleven handkerchiefs, ten pyjama trousers, ten
sleeping-jackets, and so on. When you had ticked-off all these separate
items in the list you scribbled your initials thereon and fled with your
bundle--to find, as often as not, that Sister, sorting the things into
her cupboard, could discover a mistake after all. This meant a humble
return to the Clean Linen Store to beg for the mistake's rectification;
and the sergeant in charge had merely to take your chit from his file,
and show you your own initials on it, to prove that you were in the
wrong.
It is conceivable that by means of a ward stocktaking and a reference of
the results to the figures in the sergeant's huge ledger, you might have
proved that you were not in the wrong. But the only time I ever knew one
of these disputes to be thus put to the test I admit I wished that I had
refrained from so temerarious an adventure. Somehow or other I had
managed to come back to the ward with three clean pillow-cases fewer
than the tale of dirty ones I had taken away. And Sister was exceedingly
cross. The particular Sister whose drudge I was at that period was
rather apt to be cross; and this was one of her crossest days. She
threatened to "report" me, and in fact did so. I was not--as she seemed
to expect--shot at dawn. I merely underwent a formal reproof from a high
authority who perhaps (but this is a surmise) knew Sister's
idiosyncrasies even better than I did. There remained, nevertheless, the
pressing problem of the three strayed pillow-cases. These Sister
commanded me to obtain from the Clean Linen Store. But you cannot go to
the Clean Linen Store and say "Please give me three pillow-cases." The
Clean Linen Store either says "Why?" (a question which, under the
circumstances, is flatly unanswerable), or else tells you, in language
both firm and ornamental, that you have already had them: your initialed
chit testifies the fact.
At all events, after some parley, the Clean Linen Store sergeant (who
was less of an ogre than he pretended) offered to strike a bargain with
me. If I would count all the pillow-cases, in and out of use, in my
ward, and bring him the total, he would compare the said total with the
figures in his ledger. Those figures he would not divulge to me. But if
the number I announced was three short of the number in his ledger, he
would give me the three, and say no more about it.