throughout the whole day, at almost any hour, you will find a patient or
two here; for by the rule of the hospital it is allowable for any
patient--once he has been given permission to take an unsupervised bath
at all--to take a bath whenever he likes. Consequently it happens often
that half a dozen orderlies may be bathing at the same time as half a
dozen patients--and it need not be added that the occasion is one for
pleasant chats and the barter of anecdotes. For this reason, if for no
other, I always elected to use the "old" bathroom: the "new" one, with
its closed cubicles, was less fruitful in conversations.
The "old" bathroom was the exchange (and perhaps the starting-point) of
many of our hospital rumours. I imagine that every war hospital is a
hotbed of rumours. Ours certainly was, and is. Amongst the orderlies
there are incessant rumours about promotions, about the chances of the
unit being sent abroad, about surprise inspections, about the imminent
arrival of impossibly large convoys, about news--received privately by
the Colonel over the telephone--of defeats or victories. Nine times out
of ten the rumour turns out to be groundless. But this does not cause
the output of rumours to diminish. Apparently the army is a prolific
soil for rumours, inasmuch as they have a special name: a rumour is
called a _buzz_. "Only a buzz" ("it's only a rumour") is an expression
often heard on the lips of soldiers. In India it is sometimes "a bazaar
buzz" (a rumour circulating in the bazaars); here it is, naturally, a
bathroom buzz.
Many were the choice examples of slang and of colloquialisms which I
culled in the bathroom, sitting comfortably in my bath and communing
with my neighbour in the next bath. I remember one morning making the
acquaintance of an Australian who had recently recovered from a bad
attack of trench feet. Four of the toes of one foot were missing, and
the fifth looked far from sound. My friend was examining this lonely toe
with a critical gaze, and I sympathised with him over its condition.
"Ah!" he said, "that toe is a king to what it was." He went on to tell
me (what I could well believe) that to get your "plates of meat"
frostbitten wasn't such a "cushy wound" as it was cracked up to be by
those who had never experienced its sufferings. "When I went sick the
doctor thought he'd rumbled me swinging the lead. But as soon as he
spotted them there toes of mine--the ones that's gone--I could see he
knew I'd clicked a packet, square dinkum, this trip." ("Square dinkum"
or "dinkum" is an Antipodean verbal flourish, which broadly
approximates to the American "Sure enough" or the English "Not 'arf.")
Certain of these neologisms are common enough in civilian life--have
been imported into the army since 1914--but others (and the more
interesting ones, as I hold) were, until the war, limited to the
barrack-room. British regiments which had been abroad used an argot of
considerable antiquity, some of it of Oriental origin (_e.g._ "blighty,"
meaning "home": hence "a blighty wound," or simply "a blighty," an
injury sufficiently serious to cause the victim to be invalided to
England). Whether the derivations of army slang have been investigated I
do not know. It appears to me to be a subject worth examination. I am
not myself a philologist, but in the bathrooms and elsewhere in the
hospital I have heard and noted a small collection of slang phrases and
idioms, and these may be worth recording. Such expressions as "swinging
the lead" (malingering or deceiving or acting in a hypocritical manner
or getting the better of anyone) have lost their novelty. So has
"rumbled," which means to be discovered or detected or found out. These
words have now spread far beyond the confines of the army. And indeed
the rapidity with which all slang and all catch-phrases can be
disseminated offers a rather alarming prospect. For whereas, before the
war, slang at its silliest was often quite local, nowadays its
restriction within given localities has in the nature of things become
impossible. A war hospital such as ours contains inmates from every
county in Britain, as well as from every colony. The same intermingling
occurs on an infinitely greater scale in training-camps and at the
various fronts. All these centres are hotbeds of slang: the men go home
from them, carrying to their native places slang which would never, in
ordinary times, have penetrated there. In the army you will hear a
Scotchman doing what he never did before--dropping his aitches. He has
caught it from his English comrades. You will hear him say "Not
'arf"--an inane tag which, despite its popularity in London, failed to
find any foothold north of the Tweed before the war. "Not 'arf" was
mouthed by Sassenach comedians on the music-hall stages of Edinburgh
and Glasgow, and was grinned at for what it was worth: the streets did
not adopt it. Now the streets will hear it and will use it: it is one of
Jock's souvenirs from his campaign.
I am afraid that another triviality which has hitherto been to the taste
only of the south of England is fated to "catch on," by means of the
same missionaries, from Land's End to John o' Groat's, and even in the
colonies. Rhyming slang is extraordinarily common in the army, so common
that it is used with complete unconsciousness as being correct
conversational English. My friend of the king-like toe spoke of his feet
as "plates of meat"--and this though he was an Australian, not a
cockney. If he had had occasion to allude to his leg he would probably
have called it "Scotch peg." A man's arm is his "false alarm"; his nose,
"I suppose"; his eye, "mince pie"; his hand, "German band"; his boot,
"daisy root"; his face "chevvy chase"; and so forth--an interminable
list. What exactly was the _raison d'être_ of this pseudo-poetic mania I
do not know, but I suspect that it originated, in the distant past,
with the poverty of rhyme-invention on the part of the writers of the
cruder kind of pantomime songs--"round the houses," for example, being
both a rhyme to and a synonym for "trousies" (garments beloved of those
bards!)--and thus the vogue developed. This is only a theory. The one
thing certain is that a clumsy form of slang, devoid of the humour and
compactness which justify slang--and which were on the whole once
characteristic of metropolitan slang--has tickled the ear of some
millions of men who, but for the war, would never have fallen under its
temptation. The only thing to hope for is that it will run its course
and perish--like "What ho, she bumps!" and "Now we shan't be
long!"--without leaving any visible and permanent trace upon the
language.
"Clicked," another word used by my trench-feet associate, resembles much
modern slang in the breadth and elasticity of its application. To click
can be either advantageous or baneful, according to the circumstances. A
soldier asks a superior for a favour, and it is granted. That soldier
has clicked. Or if he finds a nice girl to walk out with, he has
clicked. Or if he is given a coveted post, he has clicked. But he has
also clicked if he is suddenly seized on to do some menial duty. He has
clicked if he is discovered in a misdeed. And he has clicked a packet if
he gets into trouble generally. On such an occasion, it may be added,
the N.C.O. or officer who administers a reproof ("ticks him off"), and
does so in angry terms, "goes in off the deep end."
Not all army slang is lacking, indeed, in a facetious irony. Miserable
conditions in the desert or in the trenches, bad accommodation, doubtful
food--anything which cannot arouse the faintest enthusiasm of any
sort--these, in the lingo of our now much-travelled and stoical troops,
are "nothing to write home about." Surely there is an admirable spirit
in this sarcasm. It crops up again in the hospital metaphor "going to
the pictures." That is Tommy's way of announcing that he is to go under
the surgeon's knife, on a visit to the operating theatre. Again, there
is a sardonic tang in the army's condemnation of one who has been
telling a far-fetched story: he has been "chancing his arm" (or "mit").
Similarly one detects an oblique and wry fun in the professional army
man's use of the word "sieda" to mean "socks." (The new army more feebly
dubs them "almond rocks.") "Sieda" has been brought by the Anzacs from
Cairo, and with them it means "Good morning!"--a mere friendly hail, now
used with great frequency. But the veterans of older expeditions in
Egypt and in India, when they had been on the march, took their socks
from their perspiring feet and lay down to sleep; and in the
morning--well, their socks said "Sieda!" to them when they awoke, and
were christened accordingly.... Or again, the socks (or other property)
might have vanished in the night--in which case there had been "hooks
about" (pilferers about). If one of those "hooks" were caught, he would
be first "rammed in the mush" (put in the guardroom), and then, if his
guilt were established, he would be observed "going over the wall" or
"going to stir" (going to the detention prison).
A few other slang words which I have come across in the hospital, and
which seem to me to bear the mark of the old army as distinct from the
new, are: "bondook," a rifle; "sound scoff" (to the bugler, to sound
Rations); "scran," victuals, rations; "weighing out," paying out;
"chucking a dummy," being absent; "get the wind up," be afraid (and "put
the wind up," make afraid); "the home farm," the married quarters;
"chips," the pioneer sergeant (carpenter); "tank," wet canteen;
"tank-wallah," a drinker; "tanked," drunk; "A.T.A. wallah," a
teetotaller (from the Army Temperance Association); "on the cot" or "on
the tack," being teetotal; "jammy," lucky (and "jam," any sort of good
fortune); "win," to steal; "burgoo," porridge; "eye-wash," making things
outwardly presentable; "gone west," died (also applied to things broken,
_e.g._ a broken pipe has "gone west"); "oojah," anything (similar to
thingummy or what-d'ye-call-it); "push," "pusher," or "square push," a
girl (hence "square-push tunic," the "swagger" tunic for walking-out
occasions). The words for drunkenness are innumerable--"jingled,"
"oiled," "tanked to the wide," "well sprung," "up the pole," "blotto,"
etc.; but I smell the modern in some of these; their flavour is of
London taverns rather than of the dusty barrack squares of India, Egypt,
Malta, and Gibraltar.
But who can delve to the ultimate springs of slang? A verb which I never
met before I enlisted was "to spruce." This is almost, if not quite, a
blend of "swinging the lead" and "doing a mike." To spruce is to dodge
duty or to deceive. A man who contrived to slip out of the ranks of a
squad when they were performing some distasteful task would be said to
"spruce off." Or he would be denounced as a "sprucer" if he managed to
arrive late for his meal and yet, by a trick, to secure a front place in
the waiting queue at the canteen. A word in constant employment,
"spruce"! It was new to me when I became an orderly, and for a long time
I thought that it was peculiar to our unit, in the same manner that the
jargon of certain boys is peculiar to certain schools. But I concluded
later that it might have a remote and roundabout origin in the old army
slang, "a spruce hand" at "brag"--the latter being a variant of the game
of poker, and a spruce hand, apparently, one which, held by a bluffer,
contained cards of no real value.
Some day these etymological mysteries must be probed. Perhaps the German
professors, after the war, can usefully wreak themselves on this complex
and obscure research. Meanwhile the above notes are offered not as a
serious contribution to a subject so immense, but rather as a warning.
The infectiousness of slang is incredible; and this gigantic
inter-association of classes and clans has brought about a hitherto
unheard-of levelling-down of the common speech. Accent may or may not be
influenced: the vocabulary undoubtedly is. Nearly every home in the land
is soon going to be invaded by many forms of army slang: the process in
fact has already begun. If we were a sprightlier nation the effect might
not be all to the bad. But most of our slang-mongers are not wits. "He
was balmy a treat," I heard a soldier say of another soldier who had
shammed insane. That is what we are coming to: it is the tongue we
shall use and likewise (I fear) the condition in which some of us will
find ourselves as a result.
XV
A BLIND MAN'S HOME-COMING
In my boyhood I had the ambition--it was one of several ambitions--to
become a courier. The _Morning Post_ advertisements of couriers who
professed to be fluent in a number of languages and were at the disposal
of invalid aristocrats desiring to take extensive (and expensive) trips
abroad, aroused the most romantic visions in my mind. A courier's was
the life for me. I saw myself whirling all over Europe--with my
distinguished invalid--in sleeping-cars de luxe. Anon we were crossing
the Atlantic or lolling in punkah-induced breezes on the verandahs of
Far Eastern hotels. It was a great profession, that of the experienced
and successful courier.
I have never been a courier in quite this picturesque acceptation; and
yet, in a humbler sense, I have perhaps (to my own surprise) earned the
title. As an R.A.M.C. orderly I have more than once officiated as
travelling courier--yes, and to distinguished, if far from affluent,
invalids. They ought, at least, to rank as distinguished; for the reason
they needed a courier was because they had given their health, or limbs,
or eyesight, in defence of their country.
It happens only too often that when a patient is discharged from
hospital he is not fit to make his journey home alone. An orderly is
detailed to accompany him. Sometimes the lot has fallen on me. Generally
the trip is a short one, to some outlying suburb of London or to some
town or village in the home counties; but sometimes my flights have been
further afield, to Ireland, or Wales; and once I went to Yorkshire with
a blind man.
That Yorkshire expedition was singularly lacking in drama and in surface
pathos, yet its details remain with great clearness. The piece of
damaged goods which, being of no further fighting use, was being
returned with thanks to the hearthside from whence it came, was an
individual answering to the unheroic cognomen of Briggs. A
high-explosive shell had been sent by the Gods to alter the current of
Briggs's career. Briggs came through all that part of the war which
concerned him without a scratch upon his person--only after the arrival
in his immediate vicinity of the high-explosive shell he was
unfortunately unable to see. Never again would Briggs be of the
slightest value either as a soldier or in his civilian trade, which was
that of driver of ponies in a coal-mine. Consequently, as a
distinguished invalid (with the sum of one pound in his pocket to
comfort him until such time as his pension should materialise),
Mister--no longer Private--Briggs, for the first and presumably the last
time in his existence, went travelling with a courier.
A car supplied by the National Motor Volunteer Service awaited Briggs
and his courier at the hospital entrance. Here the introduction between
Briggs and his courier took place. Ours is a large hospital, and I had
never to my knowledge encountered Briggs before that moment. I beheld a
young fellow (he was only twenty-three) with a stout, healthy visage
which wore a pleasant smile and would have been describable as roguish,
only ... well, the eyes of a blind man, whatever else they are, are not
conducive to a roguish mien. They were eyes not visibly damaged: nice
blue eyes. And they stared at nothingness. I was in the presence of a
stripling who, a few weeks ago, must have owned a mobile face, and was
in rapid process of developing a quite different face, a face which
still might--it certainly did--grin and laugh, but which would gradually
gain, had already begun to gain, a set expressionlessness that overlaid
and strangely neutralised its grins and its laughter.
Blind men's faces may have beauty, even vivacity, or a heightened
intelligence and fire; but there is a something, hard to define, of
which they are sadly devoid. The windows of the soul are dimmed. The
face inevitably changes. And if even I, who knew not Briggs, could
perceive that Briggs's face must thus have changed, how much more
conspicuous would the change be to the partner whom Briggs had left
seven months before and to whom I was now leading him back--his wife.
Briggs, a civilian once more, sported reach-me-down garments which
fitted him surprisingly--our Clothing Store sergeant is the kindest of
souls and expends infinite patience on doing his best, with
government-contract tailoring, to suit all our discharges. His overcoat,
which might have been called a Chesterfield in Shoreditch, pleased
Briggs, as he told me in the car: he drew my attention to its texture
and warmth, he admiringly fingered it. "I might ha' paid thirty bob for
that there top-coat," he surmised. "A collar an' a tie an' all, too!
Them boots ain't so dusty, neither: they fit me a treat. Goin' 'ome to
my missus in Sunday clobber, I am." You would have said that he thought
he had emerged from his hazards with rather a good bargain. A jumble of
ready-made clothes--and a pension! The visible world gone for ever!
These were his souvenirs of the great war. And, "Ah," he said, when I
ventured on some allusion to his blindness, "it might ha' bin worse. I
don' know what I'd ha' done if I'd lost a leg, same as some of them
other poor jossers in th' hospital!"
(And this, marvellous though it sounds, is the standpoint of no small
number in the legion of our Briggses.)
The motor ride was another source of gratification to Briggs. Seated
beside me, the wind beating on his sightless orbs, he discoursed of the
wonders of petrol. "Proper to take you about, them cars. W'ere are we
now? 'Ave we far to run, like?" I told him we were traversing Battersea
Park and that our destination was St. Pancras. It transpired that he was
a stranger to London. This drive through London was, as it were, an item
in his collection of experiences, to be preserved with the cross-channel
voyage and the vigils in the trenches. "Shall we go by Buckingham
Palace?" I told him we shouldn't; then, observing that he was
disappointed, I asked the driver to make the détour. So at last I was
able to inform Briggs that we were passing Buckingham Palace: I turned
his head so that he looked straight towards that architectural
phenomenon. It was, of course, invisible to him. No matter. He wished to
be able to boast, to his wife, that he had seen (he used that verb) the
house where the King lived.
His wife--he married a month before he enlisted--had been notified of
his return; but I suggested that at St. Pancras we might telegraph to
her the actual hour of the train's arrival, in case she should desire to
meet it. The idea commended itself to Briggs: he had not thought of such
a thing: telegraphing had perhaps hardly come within his purview, at
least so I surmised when, the telegraph-form before me, I asked him what
he wished me to write. He began cheerily, as though dictating a letter
of gossip:--"_My dear wife_--" Economy necessitated a taboo of this
otherwise charming method of communication. "_Arriving Bradford
five-thirty, Tom_," was the result of final boilings-down, which took so
long that we nearly achieved the anticlimax of missing our train
altogether.
Now at Bradford (at the end of one of the chattiest five hours I ever
spent in my life) no Mrs. Briggs was perceptible. I kept my patient on
the platform until every other passenger had gone: I marched him up and
down the main area of the station. Each time I caught sight of a woman
who looked a possible Mrs. Briggs I steered my charge into her vicinity.
In spite of a piece of information which Briggs had imparted to me on
the journey--namely, that he expected soon to become a father--I was
surprised that his wife had not come to the station to welcome him.
However, it was plain that Briggs himself was not particularly
surprised, nor, what was more important, disappointed. Nothing could
damp his eternal placidity and good humour. He proposed that from this
point onward he should pursue his journey alone. "Nowt to do but git on
th' tram," he said. "It's a fair step from 'ere, but I knows every inch
of t' way." At all events (as of course I could not allow this) he would
now act as my guide. And he did. "First to the right.... Now we're goin'
by a big watchmaker's-and-jeweller's.... Now cross t' street.... Now on
th' corner over there by t' Sinnemer is w'ere we git our tram."
The tram in due course appeared, and we boarded it. "Tha mun pay
thrippence only, mind," he warned me when the conductor came round.
"It's a rare long ride for thrippence." So it proved to be--through
wildernesses which were half meadow and half slum, my cicerone at every
hundred yards pointing out the notable features of the landscape. On our
left I ought to see the so-and-so public house; on our right the
football ground--I should know it by the grand-stand jutting above the
palings; further on were brickworks; further still a factory which, my
nose would have told me, even if Mr. Briggs had not, dealt with
chemicals; then, on the skyline, a pit-head; then another; then a mining
village with three different kinds of methodist church and two picture
palaces; then a gap of dreary, dirty fields. And then, nearing dusk, the
village where my friend lived, and where also was the terminus of the
tram route.
We quitted the tram and walked down a street of those squalid brick
tenements which coal-mining seems to germinate like a rash upon the
earth's surface. The debris and the scaffoldings of pits were dotted
about the adjacent countryside. Sooty cabbage-patches occupied the
occasional interspaces in the ranks of houses. Briggs directed me across
a cinder path in one of these cabbage-patches. "See them three 'ouses at
the bottom of the 'ill? The end one's mine." We approached. No sign of
the wife. Surely she would be on the look-out for her husband? Also
there was a sister and a brother-in-law--the latter in a prosperous way
of business as a grocer near-by: Briggs had told me of them. Would not
they be watching for him? I began to be anxious. Not once, but several
times, I had heard of the wounded soldier returning to his home and
finding no home: both home and wife had gone. (Those are bitterly tragic
tales, which a realist must write some day.) Still, as we came nearer, I
saw nobody at the cottage door. "Is th' door open?" asked Briggs. Yes,
it was open. When we were at the end of the cabbage-patch, and I could
discern the interior of the cottage parlour (into which the door opened
direct), it became clear that three persons were there. One of them, a
man, obviously the brother-in-law, came and peeped out of the window at
us, and turned and spoke to his companions. Of these two, both women,
one rose from her chair and the other remained seated. But none of the
three came to the door.