half-hour of what should have been my "afternoon off" in counting all
the pillow-cases I could find in the ward. A good-natured probationer,
who sympathised with me in my difficulties (she too had suffered),
counted them also. A convalescent patient interested himself in the
problem: he also went the round of the beds, and investigated the
cupboard, counting all the pillow-cases. We three each arrived at the
same total. Armed with this total I marched back to the sergeant in the
Clean Linen Store.
He turned up his ledger and ran his finger down the page till he came
to the entry of pillow-cases opposite to my ward. And then he laughed a
laugh of fiendish glee.
"Do you know," he said, "that instead of having three pillow-cases too
few, you've seven too many!"
Such are the traps set by the business man, the expert of ledgers, for
the innocent amateur. We had actually got more pillow-cases than we were
entitled to. All unwittingly, in my eagerness to placate Sister, I had
published the mild chicanery in which she had indulged on behalf of her
ward. The sergeant, growing grey in the solution of these abstruse
mathematical and psychological mysteries, had suspected this Sister all
along. He enlightened me. She had recently been transferred from another
ward--and in her going had (against the rules) wafted with her a small
selection of that ward's property.... And now there would be a surprise
stocktaking in her new ward: the seven surplus pillow-cases--and perhaps
other loot--would have to be explained. Sister, in short, was in for a
_mauvais quart d'heure_.
It was a suitable penalty for her crossness. It should have taught her
the perils of crossness. With regret I add that she did not envisage the
episode in that light. She was merely rather crosser than before. It was
without any profound sorrow that I soon afterwards bade her farewell, on
her departure to overseas spheres of activity. But she had at least
afforded me a lesson in the importance of accuracy over my dirty and
clean linen bundles. Never again would I risk the ordeal of a surprise
stocktaking; never again would I risk a combat with a ledger-fortified
sergeant; never again would I risk any attempt at the tortuous in my
dealings with the classifications of the eighty-one items on the
tear-off leaf of that dire volume, the _Check Book for Hospital Linen_.
IX
ON BUTTONS
In one of his recent books Mr. H.G. Wells expresses a surprised
annoyance at the spectacle of spurs. Vast numbers of military gentlemen
(he observed at the front) go clanking about in spurs although they have
never had--and never will have--occasion to bestride a horse. Spurs are
a symbolic survival, a waste of steel and of labour in manufacture, a
futile expenditure of energy to keep clean and to put on and take off.
When I first enlisted I felt a similar irritation in regard to buttons.
His buttons are a burden to the new recruit. Time takes the edge off his
resentment. Time is a soother of sorrows, a healer of rancours, however
legitimate. Nevertheless one's buttons remain for ever a nuisance. I do
not complain that I should have to make my bed, polish my boots, keep
my clothes neat. These are the obvious decencies of life. But the daily
shining-up of metal buttons which need never have been made of metal at
all, which tarnish in the damp and indeed lose their lustre in an hour
in any weather, which, moreover, look much prettier dull than
bright--this is enough to convert the most bloodthirsty recruit into
obdurate pacifism.
It is to be presumed that in the pipe-claying days of peace the hours
were apt to hang heavy in barracks, and the furbishing of buttons was
devised not alone for smartness' sake, but to occupy idle hands for
which otherwise Satan might be finding some more mischievous employment.
The theory--though it throws a lurid light on the unprofitableness of a
soldier's profession when there is no war to justify his existence--is
not devoid of sense. But why this custom, designed for that excellent
mortal, the T. Atkins who walked out with nurse-maids, and was none too
busy between-whiles, should be forced upon a totally different (if no
less estimable) T. Atkins whose job hardly gives him a moment for
meals--let alone for dalliance with the fair--I cannot pretend to
fathom. It is arguable that the ornamental soldier is suited by glossy
buttons and may properly lavish time and trouble thereupon. It is not
arguable that glossy buttons are a valid feature of the garb of a
humdrum and harassed hospital orderly.
Many a time, footsore and aching with novel toil, I could have groaned
when, instead of lying down to relax, I had to tackle the polishing of
that idiotic panoply of buttons. My tunic had (it still has) five large
buttons in front, four pocket-flap buttons, two shoulder buttons, and
two shoulder numerals, "T.--R.A.M.C.--LONDON." My great-coat had (it
still has) five large front buttons, two shoulder buttons and two
shoulder numerals, three back belt buttons, two coat-tail buttons. My
cap had (it still has) a badge and two small strap-buttons. All these
must be kept brilliant. And, in addition, there was the intricate
brasswork of one's belt.
Are the wounded any better looked after because a tired orderly has
spent some of his off-duty rest-hour in rubbing metal buttons which
would have been every bit as buttonable had they been made of bone?
Many were the debates, in our hut, over the button problem. The
abolition of metal buttons being impracticable--the bold project of a
petition to the King and Lord Kitchener was never proceeded with--two
questions alone interested us: (1) which was the best polish, and (2)
which was the quickest and easiest system of polishing. The shabby
peddler-cum-boot-maker who had somehow established, at that period, a
monopoly of the minor trade of our camp, vended a substance (in penny
tins) called Soldier's Friend. This was a solidified plate-polish of a
pink hue. Having--as per the instructions--"moistened" it, in other
words, spat upon it, you worked up a modicum of the resulting pink mud
with an old toothbrush, then applied same to each button. When you had
rubbed a pink film on to the button you proceeded to rub it off again,
and lo! the tarnish had departed like an evil dream and the metal
glistened as if fresh from the mint. If you were very particular you
finished the performance with chamois leather. Thereafter you lost the
last precious five minutes before parade in efforts, with knife-blade or
clothesbrush, to remove from your tunic the smears of pink paste which
had failed to repose on the buttons and had stuck to the surrounding
cloth instead. Luckily, Soldier's Friend dries and cakes and powders off
fairly quickly. It is a lovable substance, in its simple behaviour, its
lack of complications. I surmise that somebody has made a fortune out of
manufacturing millions of those penny tins. There is at least one
imitation of Soldier's Friend on the market, and, like most imitations,
it is neither better nor worse than the original. Except for the name on
the outside of the tin, the two commodities cannot be told apart. No
doubt the imitator has likewise made a fortune. If so, both fortunes
have been amassed from a foible to whose blatant uselessness and
wastefulness even a Bond Street jeweller or a de-luxe hotel chef would
be ashamed to give countenance.
One member of the hut's company, more fastidious than his fellows,
objected to expectorating on to his Soldier's Friend. Rather than do so
he would tramp the fifty yards to our wash-place and obtain a couple of
drops of water from the tap. (The same man thought nothing of keeping a
half-consumed ham, some decaying fruit, and an opened pot of Bovril all
wrapped in his spare clothes in his box under his bed. That is by the
way. I am here concerned not with human nature, but with buttons.) Plain
water, however, was voted less effective than the more popular liquid.
The scientifically minded had a notion that human spittle contained some
acid which Nature had evolved specially to assist the action of
Soldier's Friend. I am bound to say that I was of the anti-plain-water
party myself. For a space I became an adherent of the experimentalists
who moistened their Soldier's Friend with methylated spirit, alleging
that the ensuing polish was more permanent. I lapsed. My small bottle of
methylated spirit came to an end, and on reflection I was not sure that
its superiority over spittle had been proved. Nothing, in the English
climate, can make the sheen of metal buttons endure, at the
outside, more than one day. "Bluebell," "Silvo," and the other
chemico-frictional preparations in favour of which I ultimately
abandoned Soldier's Friend, are alike in this--that their virtue lies in
frequent application, diligence and elbow-grease. They are, every one,
excellent. Their inventors deserve our gratitude. But our gratitude to
their inventors must be nothing compared with their inventors' gratitude
to the person who decreed that the hard-pressed T. Atkins of the Great
War should wear (at least in part) the same needless finery as the
relatively otiose T. Atkins of Peace. May that despot, whoever he be,
depart to a realm of bliss--I suppose it would be bliss to him--where he
has to do hospital orderlies' chores in an attire completely composed of
tarnishing buttons, every separate one of which must hourly be brought
up to the parade standard of specklessness.
X
A WORD ABOUT "SLACKERS IN KHAKI"
When the ambulances containing a new batch of wounded begin to roll up
to the entrance of the hospital they are received by a squad of
orderlies. To a spectator who happened to pass at that moment it might
appear that these orderlies had nothing else to do but lift stretchers
out of ambulances and carry them indoors. The squad of orderlies have an
air of always being ready on duty waiting to pounce out on any patient
who may arrive at any hour of the day or night and promptly transfer him
to his bed. I have known of a visitor, witnessing this incident, who
commented on it in a manner which showed that he imagined he had seen
our unit performing its sole function; he pictured us existing purely
and simply for one end--the carrying of stretchers up the front steps
into the building. He was kind enough to praise the rapidity with which
the job was done--but he held it to be a job which hardly justified the
enlistment of so considerable a company of able-bodied males. What,
exactly, we did with ourselves during the long hours when ambulances
were _not_ arriving, he failed to understand. I suppose he pictured us
twiddling our thumbs in some kind of cosy club-room situated in the
neighbourhood of the front door, from whence we could be summoned as
soon as another convoy hove in sight.
The truth of the matter is quite otherwise. Arrivals of wounded, even
when they occur several times a day (I have known six hundred patients
enter the hospital in forty-eight hours), are far from being our chief
preoccupation. Admittedly they take precedence of other duties. The
message, "Convoy coming! Every man wanted in the main hall!" is the
signal for each member of the unit who is not engaged in certain
exempted sections to drop his work, whatever it is, and proceed smartly
to report to the sergeant-in-charge. The telephone has notified us of
the hour at which the ambulances may be expected; the hospital's
internal telephone system has passed on the tidings to the various
officials concerned; and, five minutes before the patients are due, all
the orderlies likely to be required must "down tools," so to speak, and
line-up at the door. They come streaming from every corner of the
hospital and of its grounds. Some have been working in wards, some have
been pushing trollies in the corridors, some have been shovelling coke,
some have been toiling in the cookhouse or stores, some have been
shifting loads of bedding to the fumigator, some have been on "sanitary
fatigue," some have been cleaning windows or whitewashing walls, some
have been writing or typing documents, some have been spending their
rest-hour in slumber or over a game of billiards. Whatever they were
doing, they must stop doing it at the word of command.
If the convoy be a large one, its advent may even mean, for the
orderlies, the dread announcement, "All passes stopped." The luckless
wight whose one afternoon-off in the week this happens to be, and who
has probably arranged to tryst with a lady friend, finds, at the gate,
that he is turned back by the sentry. In vain he displays his pass,
properly signed, stamped and dated: the telephone has warned the sentry
(or "R.M.P."--Regimental Military Policeman) that the passes have been
countermanded. Until the convoy has been dealt with, the pass is so much
waste paper, and the unfortunate orderly's inamorata will look for him
and behold him not. How many painful misunderstandings this "All passes
stopped" law has given rise to, one shudders to guess.
But indeed no war-hospital orderly ever arranges any appointment without
the proviso that he is liable to break it. The folk who imagine that the
hospital orderly enjoys a "cushy job" (to use the appropriate
vernacular) seldom make sufficient allowance for this painful aspect of
it. The ordinary soldier in training in an English camp has his evenings
free, and certain other free times, which are nearly as sure as the
sun's rising. The hospital orderly is _never_--in theory at any
rate--off duty. His free moments are regarded not as a right but as a
favour: no freedom, at any time, can be guaranteed. He is liable to be
called on in the middle of the night, or at the instant when he is going
off duty, or when at a meal, or when resting, or when on the point of
walking out in pursuance of the gentle art of courtship. And he must
respond, instanter, or he will find that he has earned the C.B.--which
in this instance means not Companion of the Bath, but Confined to
Barracks, a punishment as hard to bear as the cruel "keeping in" of our
school-days.
Without presuming to compare either the importance or the onerousness of
the hospital orderly's work with that of the soldier capable of going to
the front to fight, I would here add that the critic who watches the
stretcher-carrying and thinks it a pity that able-bodied males should be
wasted on it, is doing the system (not to mention the men themselves) an
injustice. For the men whom he sees are not, as a matter of fact,
able-bodied, even though muscular enough to stand this short physical
effort. Excitable old gentlemen who believe that they can decide at a
glance whether a man is medically fit, and write to the Press about the
"shirkers" they think they have detected, were of the opinion, long
since, that the R.A.M.C. should be combed out. Certain journals made a
great feature of this proposal. Whatever may be the case elsewhere, I
can only say that as far as our unit was concerned it had already,
months before the newspaper agitation, been combed out five times; and
this in spite of the fact that, at the period when I enlisted, our
Colonel declined to look at any recruit who was not either over age or
had been rejected for active service. The unit was thus made up, even
then, of elderly men and of "crocks." (This was before the start of the
Derby Scheme and, of course, considerably before the introduction of
Universal Service.) Perhaps it is allowable to point the moral against
the "shirker"-discovering armchair patriots aforesaid: that no small
proportion of our unit was composed of over-age recruits who, instead
of informing the world at large that they wished they were younger,
"And, by Gad, I envy the lads their chance to do _anything_ in the
country's cause," did not rest until they had found an opening. In my
own hut there were two recruits over sixty years of age. Elsewhere in
the unit there were several over fifty. Our mess-room at meal times was,
and still is, dotted with grey-haired heads, not of retired army men
rejoined, but of men who, previous to the war, had lived comfortable
civilian lives. At a later date, when the few fit men that our
combings-out revealed had gone elsewhere, the unit was kept up to
strength by the drafting-in either of C3 recruits or of soldiers who,
having been at the front and been wounded, or invalided back, were
marked for home duty only. So much for the "slackers in khaki" which one
extra emphatic writer (himself not in khaki, although younger than
several of the orderlies here) professed to discover in the R.A.M.C.
Those "slackers" may be having an easier time of it than the heroes of
France, Gallipoli, Salonika, Egypt and Mesopotamia. But they are not
having so easy a time as some of their detractors.
The hospital orderly is not (I think I may assert on his behalf) puffed
up with foolish illusions as to his place in the scheme of things. It is
a humble place, and he knows it. His work is almost comically
unromantic, painfully unpicturesque. Moreover--let us be frank--much of
it is uninteresting, after the first novelty has worn off. Work in the
wards has its compensations: here there is the human element. But only a
portion of a unit such as ours can be detailed for ward work: the rest
are either hewers of wood and drawers of water or else have their noses
to a grindstone of clerical monotonousness beside which the
ledger-keeping of a bank employee is a heaven of blissful excitements.
You will find few hospital orderlies who are not "fed up"; you will find
none who do not long for the war's end. And I fancy you will find very,
very few who would not go on active service if they could. On the
occasions when we have had calls for overseas volunteers, the response
has always exceeded the demand. The people who, looking at a party of
hospital orderlies, remark--it sounds incredible, but there _are_ people
who make the remark--"These fellows should be out at the front," may
further be reminded that "these fellows" now have no say in the choice
of their own whereabouts. Not a soldier in the land can decide where or
how he shall serve. That small matter is not for him, but for the
authorities. He may be thirsting for the gore of Brother Boche, and an
inexorable fate condemns him to scrub the gore of Brother Briton off the
tiles of the operating theatre. He may (but I never met one who did)
elect to sit snugly on a stool at a desk filling-in army forms or
conducting a card index; and lo, at a whisper from some unseen Nabob in
the War Office, he finds himself hooked willy-nilly off his stool and
dumped into the Rifle Brigade. This is what it means to be in khaki, and
it is hardly the place of persons not in khaki to bandy sneers about the
comfortableness of the Linseed Lancers whose initials, when not standing
for Rob All My Comrades, can be interpreted to mean Run Away, Matron's
Coming. The squad of orderlies unloading that procession of ambulances
at the hospital door may not envy the wounded sufferers whom they
transmit to their wards; but the observer is mistaken if he assumes that
the orderlies have, by some questionable manoeuvre, dodged the fiery
ordeal of which this string of slow-moving stretchers is the harvest.
XI
THE RECREATION ROOMS
We rather pride ourselves, at the 3rd London, on the fame of our
hospital not merely as a place in which the wounded get well, but as a
place in which they also "have a good time." The two things, truth to
tell, are interlinked--a truism which might seem to need no labouring,
were it not for the evidence brought from more rigid and red-tape-ridden
establishments. A couple of our most valued departments are the "Old
Rec." and the "New Rec."--the old and new recreation rooms. The new
recreation room, a spacious and well-built "hut," contains three
billiard tables, a library, and current newspapers, British and
Colonial. This room is the scene of whist-drives, billiard and pool
tournaments, and other sociable ongoings. Sometimes there is an
exhibition match on the best billiard table: the local champion of
Wandsworth shows us his skill--and a very pretty touch he has: once the
lady billiard champion of England came, and defeated the best opponent
we could enlist against her--an event which provoked tremendous applause
from a packed congregation of boys in blue.
The old recreation room is fitted with a permanent stage for theatricals
and concerts. It is also our "Movie Palace." (I think our hospital was
the first to instal a cinematograph as a fixture.) During the morning
the floor area is dotted with miniature billiard tables--which are never
for a moment out of use. In the afternoon these are removed; some
hundreds of chairs replace them; and at 4.30 we begin an
entertainment--music, a play (we have had Shakespeare here), lantern
slides, films, or what not. Those entertainments, which have continued
unbrokenly since the hospital began to function in 1914, constitute the
outstanding feature of the "good time" enjoyed by 3rd Londoners. The
"Old Rec." and its crowded concerts will be a memory cherished by hosts
of fighting men from the homeland and from overseas.
In the original hospital plan--drawn up before the war--the Old Rec.
(which is a part of the main school building) was marked down to be a
ward of forty beds. Its structure, its internal geography, and the sheer
impossibility of providing it with the essential sanitary conveniences,
would make it unsuitable to be a ward of four beds, let alone of forty.
On this account its allotment for recreation purposes would be
excusable. But the Old Rec. and the New Rec. too, for that matter,
justify their superficial waste of bed-space on other--and
unanswerable--grounds. It is a mere matter of common sense to arrange
some centre to which the patient can repair and employ his leisure when
he is sufficiently well to potter about though not well enough to be
discharged from hospital. Instead of idling in his ward and disturbing
the patients who are still confined to bed--and who, often, are urgently
in need of quietness--the convalescent departs to one or other of the
recreation rooms, morning and afternoon, where he can make as much
noise as he likes and where he can meet and fraternise with his comrades
from every front. (What exchanging of stories those recreation rooms
have witnessed!) On the one hand, then, the seriously ill patient is not
annoyed by the rovings in the ward of the walking patients; and on the
other the walking patients are not irked by the necessity for keeping
quiet at a period when returning health stimulates them to a wholesome
desire for fun. Both kinds of patients, thus, may legitimately be said
to get better more quickly than they would have had a chance to do were
it not for the recreation rooms. It is within the writer's knowledge
that the medical staff of the hospital, on being consulted as to the
"bed value" of the recreation rooms, unanimously agreed that their
existence reduced the average sojourn of the hospital's inmates by a
definite "per day" ratio: that ratio, so far from showing a bed-space
waste, worked out at a per-annum gain of bed-space equivalent to a
ward--if such a colossal ward could conceived!--of upwards of 300 beds.
So much for a point which might not appear to be worth detailed
explanation, but which has here been glanced at in order that critics
(for, unbelievable though it sounds, there have been curmudgeons to
growl of spoiling the wounded by too much pleasure) may be answered in
advance. The recreation rooms are a paying investment both to the
hospital and to the State. This is our trump card in any "spoiling the
wounded" controversy--though I dare say that most of us would not, in
any case, care twopence whether the concerts and films and billiards
were an investment or an extravagance: nothing would stand in the way of
our ambition to provide the now proverbial "good time" for all the
guests of the 3rd London.