Part 18 (1/2)

Between theh and h the long day, filling the hospital with their coloured bottles, sealed packets of pills, jars and vaccines, and precious syringes in boxes marked ”To be returned at once” (I never knew a Sister fail to toss her head when she saw this e)

It is a very social spot outside the panel of the dispensary: each VAD goes there eachthere, puts down her straw basket, taps at the panel, and listens to the scolding of the old men with only half an ear

For the bachelors a by inventing odd rules and codes of their own, and, reaching a skinny arh the hatchway, they pin them on, little scraps of paper which fall down and are swept to heaven in the charwomen's pails

And the VAD's, who are not at all afraid, because one cannot be afraid of a man of whom one has never seen more than half, turn a blind eye to the slips and a deaf ear to the voices, bringing their bottles and their jars just in the ht to do when first they entered the hospital And they gossip! They have just seen thepapers on all the beds; they have just heard about the half-days for the week; they have collected little rags and ends of news as they caossip And once a bearded bachelor thu three startled faces staring at a piece of painted wood But a little dark girl worked the panel up an inch with her nails and cajoled through the crack

I have said before that the long corridor is wonderful In the winter afternoons and evenings, when the mist rolled up and down over the tiles like the smoke in a tunnel, when one walked almost in darkness and peered into the then forbidden wards, when dwarfs coer till the A block turned thes of one's own size, the corridor always made a special is it is re in close mass formation Seven ork abreast upon their knees, flanked by their pails, their handsbackwards and forwards in so complicated a system that there appears to be no system at all

Patches of the corridor are thick with soapsuds; patches are dry The art of walking the corridor in thecan be learnt, and for a year and five months I have done it with no more than a slip and a slide

But yesterday I stepped on a charwo on a puppy: one knows that sickening lift of the heart, as though the will could undo the weight of the foot

The stagger, the sense of one's unpardonable heaviness I slipped on her hand as on a piece of orange-peel, and, ju like a chamois, sent the next pail all over the heels of the front rank

It was the sort of situation hich one can do nothing

I met a friend yesterday, one of the old Chelsea people He has followed his natural develople, it wears the old hall-s to a movement which believes it ”feels the war” Personal injury or personal loss does not enter the question; the heart of this movement of his bleeds perpetually, but impersonally He claims for it that this heart is able to bleed more profusely than any other heart, individual or collective, inlet us liland!

In fact it is the only blood he has noticed

When the taxes go up he says, ”Well, now perhaps it will s that every one should lose their money so that at last they eable!)

He forgets that even in England a great many quite stupid people would rather lose their e that these people should still picture the ht bayonets and the glory of war! They think we need a vision of blood and ravage and death to turn us frohts, to still the noise of the drus don't fly

He should come down the left-hand side of the ward and hear what the dairyman says

”I 'ates it, nurse; I 'ates it Them 'orses'll kill me; them drills

It's no life for a man, nurse”

The dairyo to the Front to hate the war Solis, the last-joined, feeble creatures

”Me 'ead's that queer, nurse; it seeet queerer every day I can't 'elp worryin' I keep thinkin' of them 'orses”

Always the horses

I said to Sister, ”Is No 24 really ill?”

”There's a chance of his beingwatched”