Part 3 (1/2)
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 matinee 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 pa.s.sage, 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 amus.e.m.e.nt. 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 a.s.s 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 sh.e.l.l 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 cla.s.sification 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, pailla.s.se-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 ap.r.o.ns 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 exact.i.tude 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 was.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.e.x. (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 s.h.i.+rts 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 s.h.i.+rt 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 s.h.i.+rt slid across his line of vision in a torrent of other s.h.i.+rts. 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-ap.r.o.ns, 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 circ.u.mstances, 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.
The bargain seemed a fair one. In Sister's absence I spent a precious 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.