Observations of an Orderly Part 1

Observations of an Orderly.

by Ward Muir.

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 subst.i.tute. 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, s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 s.p.a.ce 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 a.s.sistance, 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 circ.u.mstance 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 prompt.i.tude 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 sh.e.l.ls. 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-b.u.t.ter (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 a.s.sistance, 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 gra.s.s, 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 amus.e.m.e.nt'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 c.o.ke, 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, const.i.tuted 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 j.a.panese 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 b.u.t.tons, 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 t.i.tle 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 b.u.t.tons 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 b.u.t.tons 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 compa.s.s: 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 b.u.t.tons. The one or two men who happened to be "going out on pa.s.s"--we were allowed one afternoon per week--were putting on their puttees and brushing-up the metal b.u.t.tons of their walking-out tunics (otherwise known as their Square Push Suits). The b.u.t.tons of their working tunics had of course been burnished before parade. The correct employment of b.u.t.ton-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 subst.i.tution of lost braces' b.u.t.tons 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.

Silence it was, except for the thunder of occasional pa.s.sing trains in the near-by railway cutting. These had little power to disturb. Tucked in the brown army blankets, which at first sight look so hard and so p.r.i.c.kly, we slumbered, the twenty-one of us, as one man; until, with a cruel jolt, at 5.15 that wretched alarm-clock crashed forth its summons for the fastidious few who liked to rise in ample time to bath and shave before early parade. Sometimes I was of that virtuous band, and sometimes I wasn't; but, either way, I hated the alarm-clock at 5.15,--though not so virulently as did those members of the hut who never by any chance dreamt of rising until five to six. These gentry had reduced the ritual of dressing, and of rolling up their bedding, to a speed at which it might almost be compared to expert juggling: the quickness of the hand deceived the eye. At five minutes to six you would see the juggler asleep on his pillow, in blissful innocence; at six he would be on parade, as correctly attired as you were yourself, and having left behind him, in the hut, a bed as neatly folded as yours. The world is sprinkled with people who can do this kind of thing--and our hut was blessed with its due leaven of them. But I would not a.s.sert that they _never_ had to put some finishing touches, either to their dress or to their hut equipment foldings, before the Company Officer's tour of inspection at 8.30. It sufficed that they would pa.s.s muster at 6 o'clock, when appearances are less minutely important. And the man who never rises till 5.55 detests an alarm-clock that whirrs at 5.15. The hour at which the alarm-clock should be set to detonate was one of our few acrimonious subjects of argument: I have even known it upset a discussion on Woman. But the early risers had their way, and the clock continued to be set for half an hour in front of Reveille.

The harsh vibration of the alarm at one end of the day, and the expiry of the Lights-Out talks at the other--these events marked the chief time-divisions in our hut life. While we were absent at work, our interests were many and scattered; but the hut was a nucleus for communal bonds of union which evoked no little loyalty and affection from us all. On the May morning when I first beheld that corrugated-iron abode I thought it looked inviting enough; but I did not guess how fond I was to grow of its barn-like interior and of the sportive crew who shared its mathematically-allotted floor-s.p.a.ce. "Next war," one optimist suggested during a typical Lights-Out seance, "let's all enlist together again." There were protests against the implied prophecy, but none against the proposition as such. That is the spirit of hut comradeship ... a spirit which no alarm-clock controversies can do aught to impair; for though 5.15 a.m. is an hour to test the temper of a troop of twenty-one saints, 10.15 p.m. will bring geniality and garrulousness to twenty-one sinners.