Part 2 (1/2)

Queen's Hall was reached, by bus, without mishap. After the performance there was tea at an A.B.C. shop. Here Jock, one of the totally blind men, a Scotchman--all Scots are ”Jocks” in the army--distinguished himself by facetiae (audible throughout the whole shop) on the English p.r.o.nunciation of the word 'scone,' and intimated his desire to treat the company to a ballad. This project was suppressed, but ”a silly fool in a top hat threatened to report me for having given my men drink,” said Corporal Smith. ”Jock gave _him_ the bird, not 'arf. But I thought it about time to be going home.”

So the party prepared to go home.

The bus was voted dull. Somebody suggested the tube. Corporal Smith consented.

He had forgotten that at Oxford Circus station the lifts have been abolished in favour of sliding staircases. Confronted by the escalator, Corporal Smith halted his party and informed them that they must walk down by the ordinary stair. The escalator was not safe for blind men.

Unfortunately, Jock had sniffed a lark; the one-eyed man backed him up; the party--elated perhaps by their tea--would not hear of anything so humdrum as a descent by the ordinary stair. They were going on the sliding stair. They insisted. Corporal Smith argued in vain. In vain he exerted his (purely nominal) authority. His charges mocked him. The one-eyed man leading, with Jock in his wake, they launched themselves at the sliding stair. In sheer desperation Corporal Smith brought up the rear, supporting two of the more timid venturers as best he might. None of the group except Corporal Smith himself, as it turned out, had ever travelled on an escalator before. But they had heard a comic song about a sliding stair, and they wished--Jock especially--to sample this metropolitan invention.

By dodging forward to place each blind man's hand upon the banister, Corporal Smith managed to send off his patients without a stumble. But as the stair inexorably lowered them into the bowels of the earth he realised, only too vividly, what might happen at the foot of the descent. The evening rush of suburb-bound pa.s.sengers had begun and the staircase was rather crowded. n.o.body seemed to realise that the khaki-overcoated men who stood so still upon the steps were not the usual hospital convalescents out on leave and able to look after themselves. Corporal Smith, delayed by one man who had hesitated at the top before taking the plunge, beheld his charges below him, hopelessly dotted, at intervals, amongst the general public. It was impossible for him to struggle down ahead, to the bottom of the staircase, to guide the men off as they arrived. This task, he hoped, would be adequately performed by the one-eyed man.

It might have been. The one-eyed man was game for anything. But Jock, arriving in the highest good humour at the bottom of the staircase, was tilted sideways by the curve, and promptly sat down on the landing-place. Instead of rising, he proclaimed aloud that this was funnier even than England's p.r.o.nunciation of the word 'scone.'

Whereupon various hurrying pa.s.sengers, including an old lady, tripped over his p.r.o.ne form. The sensation of being kicked and sat upon appealed to Jock's sense of humour. The more people avalanched across him the more comic he thought it. And in a moment there was quite a pile of wriggling bodies on top of him. For though the public managed on the whole to leap over, or circ.u.mvent, the obstacle presented by Jock's extremely large body, none of his blind comrades did so.

”Every single one of them fell flop,” said Corporal Smith; ”I give you my word.”

But were they downhearted? No! They regarded this mysterious hurly-burly of arms and legs as a capital jest. So far from being alarmed or annoyed, they shouted with glee. The old lady, who had gathered herself together and was directing a stream of voluble reproof at Corporal Smith for his ”callousness and cruelty to these unhappy blind heroes,” retired discomfited. Jock's comments routed her more effectively than the Corporal's a.s.surance that the episode was none of his choosing.

The party at last sorted itself out and was placed upon its feet once more. It was excessively pleased with its exploit. Hilarity reigned.

Corporal Smith, relieved, made ready to conduct his squad to the platform.

Alas, a bright idea occurred to Jock. Why not go up the other sliding stair and down again?

Agreed, _nem. con._ At least, Corporal Smith's _con._ was too futile to be worth counting.

”I had to go with the blighters,” said he. ”There was no end of a crowd by this time. And Jock and some of the others fell over at the top again. And there was a row with the ticket-collector. And people kept saying they'd report me. _Me!_ And when I'd got my party down to the bottom for the second time, and some of the tube officials had come and said they couldn't allow it and we must buzz off home, I lined the fellows up to march 'em to the train, and dash me if two weren't missing. They'd given me the slip.”

The two truants, it may be added, could not be found. Corporal Smith had to return without them. At a late hour of the evening they appeared, not an atom repentant, at the hospital, having persuaded someone to put them into the correct bus. One of them, Jock, explained that, being from the North, he had desired to seize this opportunity of seeing the sights of London. Jock, I may remind you, is totally blind. Jock's guide, the man who had volunteered to show him the sights and who had only once been in London before, could see very faintly the difference between light and dark.... Thus this pair of irresponsibles had fared forth into the dusk of Regent Street.

It sounds a very horrible fate to be blinded. But somehow the blind men themselves seldom seem to be overwhelmed by its horribleness. If you want to hear the merriest banter in a war hospital, visit the blind men's wards. The pathos of them lies less in the sadness of the victims than in the triumphant, wonderful fact that they are _not_ sad. I wish we others all inhabited the same mysteriously jocund spiritual realm as Jock and his comrades, who come tramp-tramping to the concert-room down the corridor from the D wards.

VI

WHEN THE WOUNDED ARRIVE

The receiving hall of the hospital is its clearing house of patients. It is a huge room, with a lofty and echoing roof, a little in the style of a church. Before the war, when the building was a school, this rather grandiose apartment no doubt witnessed speechifyings and prize distributions. May the time be not far distant when it will once again be used for those observances! Meanwhile its vast floor is occupied by ranks of beds.

Those beds are generally untenanted. Visitors who, like the lady in the play, have taken the wrong turning, are apt to find themselves in the receiving hall, and, gazing at its array of vacant beds, have been known to conclude that the hospital was empty. (As if any war-hospital, in these times, could be empty!) But our patients have only a short acquaintances.h.i.+p with the receiving-hall beds: these beds are momentary resting-places on their journey healthwards: they are not meant to lie in but to lie _on_. The three-score wards for which the receiving hall is the clearing house are the real destination of the patients; down long corridors, in wards far cosier because less ornate than this, the patient will find ”his” bed ready for him, the bed which he is not to lie on but _in_.

We orderlies meet each convoy at the front door of the hospital. The walking-cases are the first to arrive--men who are either not ill enough, or not badly enough wounded, to need to be put on stretchers in ambulances. They come from the station in motor-cars supplied by that indefatigable body, the London Ambulance Column. The walking-case alights from his car, is conducted into the receiving hall, and ten minutes later is in the bathroom. For the ritual of the bath must on no account be omitted--although now not so obviously imperative as in the early period of the war. Few patients reach us who have not first sojourned, either for a day or two or for weeks, in hospitals in France.

They are therefore merely travel-stained, as you or I might be travel-stained after coming over from Dublin to Euston. The bath is thus a pleasure more than a necessity. Whereas there _was_ an era, when our guests came straight from only too populous trenches....

”O.C. Baths,” as the bathroom orderly was nicknamed, had to be circ.u.mspect in the performance of his job.

The few minutes which the walking-case spends in the receiving hall are occupied (1) in drinking a cup of cocoa, and (2) in ”having his particulars taken.”

Poor soul!--he is weary of giving his ”particulars.” He has had to give them half-a-dozen times at least, perhaps more, since he left the front.