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OBSERVATIONS OF AN ORDERLY
Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital
by
L.-CPL. WARD MUIR, R.A.M.C. (T.)
Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton,
Kent & Co., Ltd., 4 Stationers'
Hall Court : : : London, E.C.4
Copyright
First published July 1917
Novels by the Author of "Observations of an Orderly"
THE AMAZING MUTES
WHEN WE ARE RICH
CUPID'S CATERERS
Also Editor of
"HAPPY--THOUGH WOUNDED"
The Book of the Third London General Hospital
TO
LT.-COL. H.E. BRUCE PORTER, C.M.G.
OFFICER IN COMMAND OF THE
3RD LONDON
GENERAL HOSPITAL
Some passages from _Observations of an Orderly_ have appeared,
generally in a shorter form, in _The Spectator_, _The New Statesman_,
_The Hospital_, _The Evening Standard_, _The National News_, _The Dundee
Advertiser_, _The Daily News_, and _The Daily Mail_. The author desires
to make the usual acknowledgments to their editors.
The coloured design on the paper wrapper is by Sergeant Noel Irving,
R.A.M.C. (T.), a member of the unit at the 3rd London General Hospital.
CONTENTS
I PAGE
MY FIRST DAY 19
II
LIFE IN THE ORDERLIES' HUTS 33
III
WASHING-UP 51
IV
A "HUT" HOSPITAL 65
V
FROM THE "D BLOCK" WARDS 79
VI
WHEN THE WOUNDED ARRIVE 93
VII
"T.... A...." 107
VIII
LAUNDRY PROBLEMS 121
IX
ON BUTTONS 137
X
A WORD ABOUT "SLACKERS IN KHAKI" 147
XI
THE RECREATION ROOMS 159
XII
THE COCKNEY 173
XIII
THE STATION PARTY 201
XIV
SLANG IN A WAR HOSPITAL 219
XV
A BLIND MAN'S HOME-COMING 235
I
MY FIRST DAY
The sergeant in charge of the clothing store was curt. He couldn't help
it: he had run short of tunics, also of "pants"--except three pairs
which wouldn't fit me, wouldn't fit anybody, unless we enlisted three
very fat dwarfs: he had kept on asking for tunics and pants, and they'd
sent him nothing but great-coats and water-bottles: I could take his
word for it, he wished he was at the Front, he did, instead of in this
blessed hole filling in blessed forms for blessed clothes which never
came. Impossible, anyhow, to rig me out. I was going on duty, was I?
Then I must go on duty in my "civvies."
It was a disappointment. Your new recruit feels that no small item of
his reward is the privilege of beholding himself in khaki. The escape
from civilian clothes was, at that era, one of the prime lures to
enlistment. I had attempted to escape before, and failed. Now at last I
had found a branch of the army which would accept me. It needed my
services instantly. I was to start work at once. Nothing better. I was
ready. This was what I had been seeking for months past. But--I confess
it--I had always pictured myself dressed as a soldier. The postponement
of this bright vision for even twenty-four hours, now that it had seemed
to be within my grasp, was damping. However--! The Sergeant-Major had
told me that I was to go on duty as orderly in Ward W--an officers'
ward--at 2 p.m. prompt. I did not know where Ward W was; I did not know
what a ward-orderly's functions should amount to. And I had no uniform.
I was attired in a light grey lounge suit--appropriate enough to my
normal habit, but quite too flippant, I was certain, for a ward-orderly.
Whatever else a ward-orderly might be, I was sure that he was not the
sort of person to sport a grey lounge suit.
Still, I must hie me to Ward W. I had got my wish. I was in the army at
last. In the army one does not argue. One obeys. So, having been
directed down an interminable corridor, I presented myself at Ward W.
On entering--I had knocked, but no response rewarded this courtesy--I
was requested, by a stern-visaged Sister, to state my business. Her
sternness was excusable. The visiting-hour was not yet, and in my
unprofessional guise she had taken me for a visitor. My explanation
dispelled her frowns. She was expecting me. Her present orderly had been
granted three days' leave. He was preparing to depart. I was to act as
his substitute. Before he went he would initiate me into the secrets of
his craft. She called him. "Private Wood!" Private Wood, in his
shirt-sleeves, appeared. I was handed over to him.
Herein I was fortunate, though I was unaware of it at the time. Private
Wood, who was not too proud to wash dishes (which was what he had at
that moment been doing), is a distinguished sculptor and a man of keen
imagination. At a subsequent period that imagination was to bring forth
the masks-for-facial-disfigurements scheme which gained him his
commission and which has attracted world-wide notice from experts.
Meanwhile his imagination enabled him to understand the exact extent of
a novice's ignorance, the precise details which I did not know and must
know, the essential apparatus I had to be shown the knack of, before he
fled to catch his train.
He devoted just five minutes, no more, to teaching me how to be a
ward-orderly. Four of those minutes were lavished on the sink-room--a
small apartment that enshrines cleaning appliances, the taps of which,
if you turn them on without precautions, treat you to an involuntary
shower bath. The sink-room contains a selection of utensils wherewith
every orderly becomes only too familiar: their correct employment, a
theme of many of the mildly Rabelaisian jests which are current in every
hospital, is a mystery--until some kind mentor, like Private Wood, lifts
the veil. In four minutes he had told me all about the sink-room, and
all about all the gear in the sink-room and all about a variety of
rituals which need not here be dwelt on. (The sink-room is an excellent
place in which to receive a private lecture.) The fifth minute was spent
in introducing me, in another room, the ward kitchen, to Mrs.
Mappin--the scrub-lady.
A scrub-lady is attached to each ward; and most wards, it should in
justice be added, are attached to their scrub-ladies. Certainly I was to
find that Ward W was attached to Mrs. Mappin. Mrs. Mappin was washing
up. Private Wood had been helping her. The completion of his task he
delegated to me. "Mrs. Mappin, this is our new orderly. He'll help you
finish the lunch-dishes." Private Wood then slid into his tunic,
snatched his cap from a nail in the wall, and vanished.
Mrs. Mappin surveyed me. "Ah!" she sighed--she was given to sighing.
"He's a good 'un, is Private Wood." The inference was plain. There was
little hope of my becoming such a good 'un. In any case, my natty grey
tweeds were against me. One could never make an orderliesque impression
in those tweeds. "Better take your jacket off," sighed Mrs. Mappin. I
did so, chose a dishcloth, and started to dry a pyramid of wet plates.
For a space Mrs. Mappin meditated, her hands in soapy water. Then she
withdrew them. "I think," she sighed, "you an' me could do with a cup of
tea."
And presently I was having tea with Mrs. Mappin.
I was afterwards to learn that this practice of calling a halt in her
labours for a cup of tea was a highly incorrect one on Mrs. Mappin's
part, and that my share in the transaction was to the last degree
reprehensible. But I was also to learn that faithful, selfless, honest,
and diligent scrub-ladies are none too common; and the Sister who
discovers that she has been allotted such a jewel as Mrs. Mappin is
seldom foolish enough to exact from her a strict obedience to the letter
of the law in discipline. Mrs. Mappin, in her non-tea-bibbing
interludes, toiled like a galley-slave, was rigidly punctual, and never
complained. Her sighs were no index of her character. They were not a
symptom of ennui (though possibly--if the suggestion be not rude--of
indigestion caused by tannin poisoning). She was the best-tempered of
creatures. It is a fact that if I had been so disposed I need never have
given Mrs. Mappin any assistance, though it was within my province to do
so. She would, without a murmur, shoulder other people's jobs as well as
her own. Having finished with bearing children (one was at the Front--it
was Mrs. Mappin who, on being asked the whereabouts of her soldier son,
said, "'E's in France; I don't rightly know w'ere the place is, but it's
_called_ 'Dugout'"), she had settled down, for the remainder of her
sojourn on this plane, to a prospect of work, continuous work. A little
more or a little less made no difference to her. She had nothing else to
do, but work; nothing else to be interested in, except work--and her
children's progress, and her cups of tea. Her ample figure concealed a
warm heart. Behind her wrinkled old face there was a brain with a
limited outfit of ideas--and the chief of those ideas was _work_.
Our cup of tea was refreshing, but it would be incorrect to convey the
notion that I was allowed to linger over such a luxury. There are few
intervals for leisure in the duty-hours of an orderly in an officers'
ward. Had the Sister and her nurses not been occupied elsewhere, I doubt
whether I should have been free to drink that cup of tea at all--a
circumstance of which perhaps Mrs. Mappin was more aware than I. At any
rate the call of "Orderly!" from a patient summoned me from the kitchen
and into the ward long before I had finished drying Mrs. Mappin's
dishes.
The patient desired some small service performed for him. I performed
it--remembering to address him as "Sir." Various other patients,
observing my presence, took the opportunity to hail me. I found myself
saying "Yes, Sir!" "In a moment, Sir!" and dropping--with a promptitude
on which I rather flattered myself--into the manner of a cross between a
valet and a waiter, with a subtle dash of chambermaid. Soon I was also a
luggage-porter, staggering to a taxi with the ponderous impedimenta of a
juvenile second lieutenant who was bidding the hospital farewell, and
whose trunks contained--at a guess--geological specimens and battlefield
souvenirs in the shape of "dud" German shells. This young gentleman
fumbled with a gratuity, then thought better of it--and was gracious
enough to return my grin. "Bit awkward, tipping, in these days," he
apologised cheerily, depositing himself in his taxi behind ramparts of
holdalls. "Thank you, Sir," seemed the suitable adieu, and having
proffered it I scampered into the ward again. Anon Sister sent me with a
message to the dispensary. Where the dispensary was I knew not. But I
found out, and brought back what she required. Then to the post office.
Another exploration down that terrific corridor. Post office located at
last and duly noted. Then to the linen store to draw attention to an
error in the morning's supply of towels. Linen store eventually
unearthed--likewise the information that its staff disclaimed all
responsibility for mistakes--likewise the first inkling of a profound
maxim, that when a mistake has been made, in hospital, it is always the
orderly, and no one else, who has made it.
Engaged on these errands, and a host of intervening lesser exploits in
the ward, I had to cultivate an unwonted fleetness of foot. I flew. So
did the time. Almost immediately, as it seemed to me, I was bidden to
serve afternoon tea to our patients. The distribution of bed-tables, of
cups, of bread-and-butter (most of which, also, I cut); the "A little
more tea, Sir?" or, "A pot of jam in your locker, Sir, behind the pair
of trousers?... Yes, here it is, Sir"; the laborious feeding of a
patient who could not move his arms;--all these occupied me for a
breathless hour. Then an involved struggle with a patient who had to be
lifted from a bath-chair into bed. (I had never lifted a human being
before.) Then a second bout of washing-up with Mrs. Mappin. Then a
nominal half-an-hour's respite for my own tea--actually ten minutes, for
I was behindhand. Then, all too soon, more waitering at the ceremony of
Dinner: this time with the complication that some of my patients were
allowed wine, beer, or spirits, and some were not. "Burgundy, Sir?"
"Whiskey-and-soda, Sir?" I ran round the table of the sitting-up
patients, displaying (I was pleased to think) the complete aplomb and
nimbleness of a thoroughbred Swiss _garcon_, pouring out drinks--with
concealed envy--placing and removing plates, handing salt, bread,
serviettes.... After which, back to Mrs. Mappin and her renewed mountain
of once-more-to-be-washed-and-dried crockery.
It was long after my own supper hour had come and gone that I was able
to say au revoir to the ward. The cleansing of the grease-encrusted
meat-tin was a travail which alone promised to last half the night.
(Mrs. Mappin eventually lent me her assistance, and later I became more
adroit.) And the calls of "Orderly!" from the bed patients were
interruptions I could not ignore. But at last some sort of conclusion
was reached. Mrs. Mappin put on her bonnet. The night orderly, who was
to relieve me, was overdue. Sister, discovering me still in the kitchen,
informed me that I might leave.
"You ain't 'ad any supper, 'ave you?" said Mrs. Mappin. "You won't get
none now, neither. Should 'ave done a bunk a full hower back, you
should."
She drew me into the larder, and indicated the debris of our patients'
repast. "A leg of chicken and some rice pudden. Only wasted if _you_
don't 'ave it."
"But is it allowed--?" I was, in truth, not only tired but ravenous.
Sister, entering upon this conspiratorial dialogue, unhesitatingly gave
her approval.
Cold rice pudding and a left-over leg of chicken, eaten standing, at a
shelf in a larder, can taste very good indeed, even to the wearer of a
spick-and-span grey lounge suit. I shall know in future what it means
when my restaurant waiter emerges from behind the screened service-door
furtively wiping his mouth. I sympathise. I too have wolfed the choice
morsels from the banquet of my betters.
II
LIFE IN THE ORDERLIES' HUTS
In May, 1915, when I enlisted, the weather was beautiful. Consequently
the row of tin huts, to which I was introduced as my future address "for
the duration," wore an attractive appearance. The sun shone upon their
metallic sides and roofs. The shimmering foliage of tall trees, and a
fine field of grass, which made a background to the huts, were fresh and
green and restful to the eye. Even the foreground of hard-trodden
earth--the barrack square--was dry and clean, betraying no hint of its
quagmire propensities under rain. Later on, when winter came, the
cluster of huts could look dismal, especially before dawn on a wet
morning, when the bugle sounding parade had dragged us from warm beds;
or in an afternoon thaw after snow, when the corrugated eaves wept
torrents in the twilight, and one's feet (despite the excellence of army
boots) were chilled by their wadings through slush. Meanwhile, however,
the new recruit had nothing to complain of in the aspect of the housing
accommodation which was offered him. Merely for amusement's sake he had
often "roughed it" in quarters far less comfortable than these bare but
well-built huts--which even proved, on investigation, to contain beds:
an unexpected luxury.
"I'll put you in Hut 6," said the Sergeant-Major. "There's one empty
bed. It's the hut at the end of the line."
Thereafter Hut 6 was my home--and I hope I may never have a less
pleasant one or less good company for room-mates. In these latter I was
perhaps peculiarly fortunate. But that is by the way. It suffices that
twenty men, not one of whom I had ever seen before, welcomed a total
stranger, and both at that moment and in the long months which were to
elapse before various rearrangements began to scatter us, proved the
warmest of friends.
Twenty-one of us shared our downsittings and our uprisings in Hut 6.
There might have been an even number, twenty-two, but one bed's place
was monopolised by a stove (which in winter consumed coke, and in summer
was the repository of old newspapers and orange-peel). The hut,
accordingly, presented a vista of twenty-one beds, eleven along one wall
and ten along the other, the stove and its pipe being the sole
interruption of the symmetrical perspective. Above the beds ran a
continuous shelf, bearing the hut-inhabitants' equipment, or at least
that portion of it--great-coat, water-bottle, mess-tin, etc.--not
continually in use. Below each bed its owner's box and his boots were
disposed with rigid precision at an exact distance from the box and
boots beneath the adjacent bed. In the ceiling hung two electric lights.
These, with the stove, beds, shelves, boxes and boots, constituted the
entire furniture of the hut--unless you count an alarm-clock, bought by
public subscription, and notable for a trick of tinkling faintly, as
though wanting to strike but failing, in the watches of the night, hours
before its appointed minute had arrived. The hut contained no other
furniture whatever, and in those days did not seem to us to require any.
In the autumn, when the daylight shortened and we could no longer hold
our parliaments on a bench outside, a couple of deck-chairs were
mysteriously imported; and, as the authorities remained unshocked, a
small table also appeared and was squeezed into a gap beside the stove.
Some sybarite even goaded us into getting up a fund for a strip of
linoleum to be laid in the aisle between the beds. This was done--I do
not know why, for personally I have no objection to bare boards. I
suppose linoleum is easier to keep clean than wood; and that aisle,
tramped on incessantly by hobnail boots which in damp weather were, as
to their soles and heels, mere bulbous trophies of the alluvial deposits
of the neighbourhood, was sometimes far from speckless. But to me the
strip of linoleum made our hut look remotely like a real room in a real
house: it was a touch of the conventional which I never cared for, and I
only subscribed to it when I had voted against it and been overborne. An
extraordinary proposition, that we should inaugurate a plant in a pot
on the stove's lid in summer, was, I am glad to say, negatived. It would
have been the thin end of the wedge ... we might have arrived at
Japanese fans and photograph-frames on the walls.
Not that our Company Officer would have tolerated any nonsense of that
kind. Punctually at eight-thirty, after the second parade of the day, he
marched through each hut, inspecting it and calling the attention of the
Sergeant-Major to any detail which offended his sense of fitness. On wet
mornings, instead of parading outside, each man stood to his cot, and
thus the comments of the Company Officer, as he went down the aisle,
were audible to all. Stiffly drawn up to attention, we wondered
anxiously whether he would notice anything wrong with our buttons, boots
or belts, or whether he would "spot" the books and jam jars hidden
behind our overcoats on the shelves. Nothing so decadent and civilian as
a book--and certainly nothing so unsightly as a jam jar--must be visible
on your barrack-room shelf. It is sacred to equipment, and particularly
to the folded great-coat.
"The Art of Folding" might have been the title of the first lesson of
the many so good-naturedly imparted to me by my new comrades. There was,
I learnt, a right way and a wrong way to fold all things foldable. The
great-coat, for instance, must at the finish of its foldings, when it is
placed upon the exactly middle spot above your bed's end, present to the
eye of the beholder a kind of flat-topped pyramid whose waist-line (if a
pyramid can be said to own a waist) is marked by the belt with the three
polished buttons peeping through. The belt must bulge neither to the
right nor to the left; the pyramidal edifice of great-coat must not
loll--it must sit up prim and firm. And unless all your foldings of the
great-coat, from first to last, have, been deftly precise, no pyramid
will reward you, but a flabby trapezium: the belt will sag, its buttons
won't come centrally, and indeed the whole edifice of unwieldy cloth
will topple off its perch on the narrow shelf--which was designed to
refuse all lodgment for the property of persons who had unsound ideas
on the subject of compact storage.
The second series of folderies to which the novice was initiated
concerned themselves with his bedding. This consisted of a mattress,
three blankets and a pillow. It is an outfit at which no one need turn
up his nose. I never spent a bad night in army blankets, though when out
on leave I am sometimes a victim of insomnia between clean cold sheets.
But the moment the Reveille uplifted you from your couch, that couch had
to be made ship-shape according to rule. No finicky "airing"! The
mattress must be rolled up, with the pillow as its core, and placed at
the end of the bed. On top of it a blanket, folded longwise and with the
ends hanging down, was laid neatly; on top of _that_ you put the other
two blankets, folded quite otherwise; then you brought the first
blanket's ends over, and reversed the resultant bundle and pressed it
down into a thin stratified parallelogram with oval ends. The strata of
the said parallelogram, viewed from the aisle, must show no blanket
_edges_, only curves of the blankets' folds: the edges (if visible at
all) must face inwards, not outwards. Correct folding, to be sure, gave
no visible edges, viewed from either side; and, once you caught the
knack, correct folding was just as easy as incorrect--though there were
temperaments which did not find it so and which rebelled against these
niceties.
I was afterwards to learn that this mania for matching (if mania be
indeed a legitimate word for a custom based on common-sense principles
and seldom carried to the extremes which the recruit has been led to
fear) obtains not only in the army but also in the nursing profession.
Not long after I became a ward orderly I got a wigging from my "Sister"
because I had not noticed that every pillow-case of a ward's beds must
face towards the same point of the compass: the pillows on the vista of
beds must be placed in such a manner that the pillow-case mouths are,
all of them, turned away from anyone entering the ward's door. Similarly
the overlap of the counterpanes must all be of exactly the same depth
and caught up at exactly the same angle, the resulting series of pairs
of triangles all ending at exactly the same spot in each bedstead. These
trifles reveal at a glance the professional touch in a ward, and are, I
understand, not by any means the insignia of a military as distinct from
a civilian hospital. They may or may not contribute to the comfort of
the patient, but they betoken the captaincy of one whose methodicalness
will in other and less visible respects most emphatically benefit him.
Our hut life was something more than a mere folding-up of bedding on
bedsteads and great-coats on shelves. After midday dinner it was
allowable to unroll the mattress, make the bed, and rest thereon--which
most of us by that time (having been on the run since 6 o'clock parade)
were very ready to do. There was half an hour to spare before 2 o'clock
parade, and a precious half-hour it was. Snores rose from some of the
beds where students of the war had collapsed beneath the newspapers
which they had meant to read. Desultory conversation enlivened those
corners where the denizens of the hut were energetic enough to polish
their boots or sew on buttons. The one or two men who happened to be
"going out on pass"--we were allowed one afternoon per week--were
putting on their puttees and brushing-up the metal buttons of their
walking-out tunics (otherwise known as their Square Push Suits). The
buttons of their working tunics had of course been burnished before
parade. The correct employment of button-sticks and of the magic cleaner
called Soldier's Friend; the polishing of one's out-of-use boots and
their placing, on the floor, with tied laces, and with their toes in
line with the bed's legs; the substitution of lost braces' buttons by
"bulldogs"; the furbishing of one's belt; the propping-up of the front
of one's cap with wads of paper in the interior of the crown; the
devices whereby non-spiral puttees can be coaxed into a resemblance of
spiral ones and caused to ascend in corkscrews above trousers which
refuse to tuck unlumpily into one's socks--these, and a host of other
matters, always kept a proportion of the hut-dwellers awake and busy and
loquacious even in the somnolent post-prandial half-hour before 2
o'clock.
But it was at night, at bedtime, that the hut became generally sociable.
Lights-Out sounded at 10.15; and at 10.10 we were all scrambling into
our pyjamas. In winter our disrobing was hasty; in summer it was an
affair of leisure, and deshabille roamings to and fro in the aisle, and
gossip. When the bugle blew and the electric lights suddenly ceased to
glow, leaving the hut in a darkness broken only by the dim shapes of the
windows and the red of cigarette-ends, many of us still had to complete
our undressing. We became adepts at doing this in the dark and so
disposing of the articles of our attire that they could be instantly
retrieved in the morning. Once between the blankets, conversation at
first waxed rather than waned. The Night Wardmaster, whose duty it was
to make the round of the orderlies' huts, disapproved of conversation
after Lights-Out, and was apt to say so, loudly and menacingly, when he
surprised us by popping his head in at the door. But--well--the Night
Wardmaster always departed in the long run.... And then uprose, between
bed and bed, those unconclusive debates in which the masculine soul
delighteth: Theology; Woman; Victuals; Politics; Art; the Press; Sport;
Marriage; Money--and sometimes even The War; likewise the purely local
topics of Sisters and their Absurdities; Our Officers; The Other Huts;
What the Sergeant-Major Said; Why V.A.D.'s can't replace Male Orderlies;
What this Morning's Operations Looked Like; Whether an Officers' Ward or
a Men's Ward is the nicer; Who Deserves Stripes; C.O.'s Parade and its
Terrors; Advantages of Volunteering for Night Duty; The Cushy Job of
being in charge of a Sham Lunacy Case; Other Cushy Jobs less cushy than
They Sounded; and so forth; until at last protests began to be voiced by
the wearier folk who wanted silence.
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