Observations of an Orderly Part 6

It was too bad. It was base ingrat.i.tude to the devoted band of Bluebottles who had, up till that instant, been toiling at the evacuation of the ward--and who, as I chanced to know, had been up all the previous night, carrying stretchers at Paddington and Charing Cross, while _we_ slept cosily. But--well, there it was. "Here are some real soldiers!" Khaki greeted khaki--simultaneously spurning the mere amateur, the civilian. I could have blushed for the injustice of that nave cry. But it would be dishonest not to confess that there was something gratifying about it too. It was the cry of the Army, always loyal to the Army. These heroic bundles of bandages, lifting wild and unshaven faces from their pillows, hailed _me_ (a wretched creature who had never heard a gun go off) as one of their comrades! My mate and I, as we adjusted our stretcher at a cot's side, and braced ourselves against the weight of the patient, winked covertly at one another. "A nasty one for the Bluebottles!" he said. And it was.

All the same I seize this opportunity of offering my homage to the Bluebottles. They have done--are still doing--their bit, and that right n.o.bly. Thousands of British soldiers have cause to bless them and also to be thankful for the existence of that great voluntary inst.i.tution, the London Ambulance Column.

When at last the train had been emptied and the ultimate stretcher was _en route_ for the hospital, our party gathered once more at the top of the stair, lined up, and was glanced-over by the corporal lest any man had seized the opportunity to play truant. There were occasions when some thirsty soul, chafing at the rigours of the strict teetotalism enforced by our rules, was found to have vanished in the hurly-burly: his destination, the up-platform refreshment-bar, being readily surmisable. He had cause to regret his lapse if it were noticed before he slipped back unostentatiously into our ranks. Then, "Party, 'shun!

Left turn! Right incline--quick march!" Off we swung, out into the streets--cheered by the urchins who still hovered round the gate--and so, at the rapidest possible pace, home to dinner and a smoke: these (in my case at any rate) being preceded by the thankful relinquishment of my seldom-worn and therefore none too friendly marching-boots.

XIV

SLANG IN A WAR HOSPITAL

Every ward in the hospital has a bathroom attached to it, but in addition to these there are two large bathrooms, each containing a number of baths, which are used by walking patients and also by the orderlies. The more recently built of these bathrooms is divided into private cubicles. In the older one the baths are on a more sociable plan, with no part.i.tion walls sundering them. The spectacle, in the "old" bathroom, when a convoy of walking cases has arrived, is one which should appeal to a painter. Clouds of steam fill the air, and through the fog you perceive a fine melee of figures, some half dressed, some statuesquely nude, towelling themselves or preparing to wash, or shaving at bits of mirror propped on the window-sills. Pink bodies wallow voluptuously in the deep porcelain-ware tubs, which are of the shape and superb dimensions of Egyptian sarcophagi. Sometimes a patient with a wounded arm, unable to help himself, is being soaped and sponged by an orderly; or you may see a cheerful soul, with an injured foot, balanced on the rim of the bath and giving himself all the ablutions which are practicable without the disturbance of bandages. No one who has frequented our bathrooms would ever doubt that the British Army loves cleanliness and hot water. Of cold water I cannot speak with the same enthusiasm.

A newly-arrived convoy of course monopolises the bathroom; but throughout the whole day, at almost any hour, you will find a patient or two here; for by the rule of the hospital it is allowable for any patient--once he has been given permission to take an unsupervised bath at all--to take a bath whenever he likes. Consequently it happens often that half a dozen orderlies may be bathing at the same time as half a dozen patients--and it need not be added that the occasion is one for pleasant chats and the barter of anecdotes. For this reason, if for no other, I always elected to use the "old" bathroom: the "new" one, with its closed cubicles, was less fruitful in conversations.

The "old" bathroom was the exchange (and perhaps the starting-point) of many of our hospital rumours. I imagine that every war hospital is a hotbed of rumours. Ours certainly was, and is. Amongst the orderlies there are incessant rumours about promotions, about the chances of the unit being sent abroad, about surprise inspections, about the imminent arrival of impossibly large convoys, about news--received privately by the Colonel over the telephone--of defeats or victories. Nine times out of ten the rumour turns out to be groundless. But this does not cause the output of rumours to diminish. Apparently the army is a prolific soil for rumours, inasmuch as they have a special name: a rumour is called a _buzz_. "Only a buzz" ("it's only a rumour") is an expression often heard on the lips of soldiers. In India it is sometimes "a bazaar buzz" (a rumour circulating in the bazaars); here it is, naturally, a bathroom buzz.

Many were the choice examples of slang and of colloquialisms which I culled in the bathroom, sitting comfortably in my bath and communing with my neighbour in the next bath. I remember one morning making the acquaintance of an Australian who had recently recovered from a bad attack of trench feet. Four of the toes of one foot were missing, and the fifth looked far from sound. My friend was examining this lonely toe with a critical gaze, and I sympathised with him over its condition.

"Ah!" he said, "that toe is a king to what it was." He went on to tell me (what I could well believe) that to get your "plates of meat"

frostbitten wasn't such a "cushy wound" as it was cracked up to be by those who had never experienced its sufferings. "When I went sick the doctor thought he'd rumbled me swinging the lead. But as soon as he spotted them there toes of mine--the ones that's gone--I could see he knew I'd clicked a packet, square d.i.n.k.u.m, this trip." ("Square d.i.n.k.u.m"

or "d.i.n.k.u.m" is an Antipodean verbal flourish, which broadly approximates to the American "Sure enough" or the English "Not 'arf.")

Certain of these neologisms are common enough in civilian life--have been imported into the army since 1914--but others (and the more interesting ones, as I hold) were, until the war, limited to the barrack-room. British regiments which had been abroad used an argot of considerable antiquity, some of it of Oriental origin (_e.g._ "blighty,"

meaning "home": hence "a blighty wound," or simply "a blighty," an injury sufficiently serious to cause the victim to be invalided to England). Whether the derivations of army slang have been investigated I do not know. It appears to me to be a subject worth examination. I am not myself a philologist, but in the bathrooms and elsewhere in the hospital I have heard and noted a small collection of slang phrases and idioms, and these may be worth recording. Such expressions as "swinging the lead" (malingering or deceiving or acting in a hypocritical manner or getting the better of anyone) have lost their novelty. So has "rumbled," which means to be discovered or detected or found out. These words have now spread far beyond the confines of the army. And indeed the rapidity with which all slang and all catch-phrases can be disseminated offers a rather alarming prospect. For whereas, before the war, slang at its silliest was often quite local, nowadays its restriction within given localities has in the nature of things become impossible. A war hospital such as ours contains inmates from every county in Britain, as well as from every colony. The same intermingling occurs on an infinitely greater scale in training-camps and at the various fronts. All these centres are hotbeds of slang: the men go home from them, carrying to their native places slang which would never, in ordinary times, have penetrated there. In the army you will hear a Scotchman doing what he never did before--dropping his aitches. He has caught it from his English comrades. You will hear him say "Not 'arf"--an inane tag which, despite its popularity in London, failed to find any foothold north of the Tweed before the war. "Not 'arf" was mouthed by Sa.s.senach comedians on the music-hall stages of Edinburgh and Glasgow, and was grinned at for what it was worth: the streets did not adopt it. Now the streets will hear it and will use it: it is one of Jock's souvenirs from his campaign.

I am afraid that another triviality which has. .h.i.therto been to the taste only of the south of England is fated to "catch on," by means of the same missionaries, from Land's End to John o' Groat's, and even in the colonies. Rhyming slang is extraordinarily common in the army, so common that it is used with complete unconsciousness as being correct conversational English. My friend of the king-like toe spoke of his feet as "plates of meat"--and this though he was an Australian, not a c.o.c.kney. If he had had occasion to allude to his leg he would probably have called it "Scotch peg." A man's arm is his "false alarm"; his nose, "I suppose"; his eye, "mince pie"; his hand, "German band"; his boot, "daisy root"; his face "chevvy chase"; and so forth--an interminable list. What exactly was the _raison d'etre_ of this pseudo-poetic mania I do not know, but I suspect that it originated, in the distant past, with the poverty of rhyme-invention on the part of the writers of the cruder kind of pantomime songs--"round the houses," for example, being both a rhyme to and a synonym for "trousies" (garments beloved of those bards!)--and thus the vogue developed. This is only a theory. The one thing certain is that a clumsy form of slang, devoid of the humour and compactness which justify slang--and which were on the whole once characteristic of metropolitan slang--has tickled the ear of some millions of men who, but for the war, would never have fallen under its temptation. The only thing to hope for is that it will run its course and perish--like "What ho, she b.u.mps!" and "Now we shan't be long!"--without leaving any visible and permanent trace upon the language.

"Clicked," another word used by my trench-feet a.s.sociate, resembles much modern slang in the breadth and elasticity of its application. To click can be either advantageous or baneful, according to the circ.u.mstances. A soldier asks a superior for a favour, and it is granted. That soldier has clicked. Or if he finds a nice girl to walk out with, he has clicked. Or if he is given a coveted post, he has clicked. But he has also clicked if he is suddenly seized on to do some menial duty. He has clicked if he is discovered in a misdeed. And he has clicked a packet if he gets into trouble generally. On such an occasion, it may be added, the N.C.O. or officer who administers a reproof ("ticks him off"), and does so in angry terms, "goes in off the deep end."

Not all army slang is lacking, indeed, in a facetious irony. Miserable conditions in the desert or in the trenches, bad accommodation, doubtful food--anything which cannot arouse the faintest enthusiasm of any sort--these, in the lingo of our now much-travelled and stoical troops, are "nothing to write home about." Surely there is an admirable spirit in this sarcasm. It crops up again in the hospital metaphor "going to the pictures." That is Tommy's way of announcing that he is to go under the surgeon's knife, on a visit to the operating theatre. Again, there is a sardonic tang in the army's condemnation of one who has been telling a far-fetched story: he has been "chancing his arm" (or "mit").

Similarly one detects an oblique and wry fun in the professional army man's use of the word "sieda" to mean "socks." (The new army more feebly dubs them "almond rocks.") "Sieda" has been brought by the Anzacs from Cairo, and with them it means "Good morning!"--a mere friendly hail, now used with great frequency. But the veterans of older expeditions in Egypt and in India, when they had been on the march, took their socks from their perspiring feet and lay down to sleep; and in the morning--well, their socks said "Sieda!" to them when they awoke, and were christened accordingly.... Or again, the socks (or other property) might have vanished in the night--in which case there had been "hooks about" (pilferers about). If one of those "hooks" were caught, he would be first "rammed in the mush" (put in the guardroom), and then, if his guilt were established, he would be observed "going over the wall" or "going to stir" (going to the detention prison).

A few other slang words which I have come across in the hospital, and which seem to me to bear the mark of the old army as distinct from the new, are: "bondook," a rifle; "sound scoff" (to the bugler, to sound Rations); "scran," victuals, rations; "weighing out," paying out; "chucking a dummy," being absent; "get the wind up," be afraid (and "put the wind up," make afraid); "the home farm," the married quarters; "chips," the pioneer sergeant (carpenter); "tank," wet canteen; "tank-wallah," a drinker; "tanked," drunk; "A.T.A. wallah," a teetotaller (from the Army Temperance a.s.sociation); "on the cot" or "on the tack," being teetotal; "jammy," lucky (and "jam," any sort of good fortune); "win," to steal; "burgoo," porridge; "eye-wash," making things outwardly presentable; "gone west," died (also applied to things broken, _e.g._ a broken pipe has "gone west"); "oojah," anything (similar to thingummy or what-d'ye-call-it); "push," "pusher," or "square push," a girl (hence "square-push tunic," the "swagger" tunic for walking-out occasions). The words for drunkenness are innumerable--"jingled,"

"oiled," "tanked to the wide," "well sprung," "up the pole," "blotto,"

etc.; but I smell the modern in some of these; their flavour is of London taverns rather than of the dusty barrack squares of India, Egypt, Malta, and Gibraltar.

But who can delve to the ultimate springs of slang? A verb which I never met before I enlisted was "to spruce." This is almost, if not quite, a blend of "swinging the lead" and "doing a mike." To spruce is to dodge duty or to deceive. A man who contrived to slip out of the ranks of a squad when they were performing some distasteful task would be said to "spruce off." Or he would be denounced as a "sprucer" if he managed to arrive late for his meal and yet, by a trick, to secure a front place in the waiting queue at the canteen. A word in constant employment, "spruce"! It was new to me when I became an orderly, and for a long time I thought that it was peculiar to our unit, in the same manner that the jargon of certain boys is peculiar to certain schools. But I concluded later that it might have a remote and roundabout origin in the old army slang, "a spruce hand" at "brag"--the latter being a variant of the game of poker, and a spruce hand, apparently, one which, held by a bluffer, contained cards of no real value.

Some day these etymological mysteries must be probed. Perhaps the German professors, after the war, can usefully wreak themselves on this complex and obscure research. Meanwhile the above notes are offered not as a serious contribution to a subject so immense, but rather as a warning.

The infectiousness of slang is incredible; and this gigantic inter-a.s.sociation of cla.s.ses and clans has brought about a hitherto unheard-of levelling-down of the common speech. Accent may or may not be influenced: the vocabulary undoubtedly is. Nearly every home in the land is soon going to be invaded by many forms of army slang: the process in fact has already begun. If we were a sprightlier nation the effect might not be all to the bad. But most of our slang-mongers are not wits. "He was balmy a treat," I heard a soldier say of another soldier who had shammed insane. That is what we are coming to: it is the tongue we shall use and likewise (I fear) the condition in which some of us will find ourselves as a result.

XV

A BLIND MAN'S HOME-COMING

In my boyhood I had the ambition--it was one of several ambitions--to become a courier. The _Morning Post_ advertis.e.m.e.nts of couriers who professed to be fluent in a number of languages and were at the disposal of invalid aristocrats desiring to take extensive (and expensive) trips abroad, aroused the most romantic visions in my mind. A courier's was the life for me. I saw myself whirling all over Europe--with my distinguished invalid--in sleeping-cars de luxe. Anon we were crossing the Atlantic or lolling in punkah-induced breezes on the verandahs of Far Eastern hotels. It was a great profession, that of the experienced and successful courier.

I have never been a courier in quite this picturesque acceptation; and yet, in a humbler sense, I have perhaps (to my own surprise) earned the t.i.tle. As an R.A.M.C. orderly I have more than once officiated as travelling courier--yes, and to distinguished, if far from affluent, invalids. They ought, at least, to rank as distinguished; for the reason they needed a courier was because they had given their health, or limbs, or eyesight, in defence of their country.

It happens only too often that when a patient is discharged from hospital he is not fit to make his journey home alone. An orderly is detailed to accompany him. Sometimes the lot has fallen on me. Generally the trip is a short one, to some outlying suburb of London or to some town or village in the home counties; but sometimes my flights have been further afield, to Ireland, or Wales; and once I went to Yorkshire with a blind man.

That Yorkshire expedition was singularly lacking in drama and in surface pathos, yet its details remain with great clearness. The piece of damaged goods which, being of no further fighting use, was being returned with thanks to the hearthside from whence it came, was an individual answering to the unheroic cognomen of Briggs. A high-explosive sh.e.l.l had been sent by the G.o.ds to alter the current of Briggs's career. Briggs came through all that part of the war which concerned him without a scratch upon his person--only after the arrival in his immediate vicinity of the high-explosive sh.e.l.l he was unfortunately unable to see. Never again would Briggs be of the slightest value either as a soldier or in his civilian trade, which was that of driver of ponies in a coal-mine. Consequently, as a distinguished invalid (with the sum of one pound in his pocket to comfort him until such time as his pension should materialise), Mister--no longer Private--Briggs, for the first and presumably the last time in his existence, went travelling with a courier.

A car supplied by the National Motor Volunteer Service awaited Briggs and his courier at the hospital entrance. Here the introduction between Briggs and his courier took place. Ours is a large hospital, and I had never to my knowledge encountered Briggs before that moment. I beheld a young fellow (he was only twenty-three) with a stout, healthy visage which wore a pleasant smile and would have been describable as roguish, only ... well, the eyes of a blind man, whatever else they are, are not conducive to a roguish mien. They were eyes not visibly damaged: nice blue eyes. And they stared at nothingness. I was in the presence of a stripling who, a few weeks ago, must have owned a mobile face, and was in rapid process of developing a quite different face, a face which still might--it certainly did--grin and laugh, but which would gradually gain, had already begun to gain, a set expressionlessness that overlaid and strangely neutralised its grins and its laughter.

Blind men's faces may have beauty, even vivacity, or a heightened intelligence and fire; but there is a something, hard to define, of which they are sadly devoid. The windows of the soul are dimmed. The face inevitably changes. And if even I, who knew not Briggs, could perceive that Briggs's face must thus have changed, how much more conspicuous would the change be to the partner whom Briggs had left seven months before and to whom I was now leading him back--his wife.

Briggs, a civilian once more, sported reach-me-down garments which fitted him surprisingly--our Clothing Store sergeant is the kindest of souls and expends infinite patience on doing his best, with government-contract tailoring, to suit all our discharges. His overcoat, which might have been called a Chesterfield in Sh.o.r.editch, pleased Briggs, as he told me in the car: he drew my attention to its texture and warmth, he admiringly fingered it. "I might ha' paid thirty bob for that there top-coat," he surmised. "A collar an' a tie an' all, too!

Them boots ain't so dusty, neither: they fit me a treat. Goin' 'ome to my missus in Sunday clobber, I am." You would have said that he thought he had emerged from his hazards with rather a good bargain. A jumble of ready-made clothes--and a pension! The visible world gone for ever!

These were his souvenirs of the great war. And, "Ah," he said, when I ventured on some allusion to his blindness, "it might ha' bin worse. I don' know what I'd ha' done if I'd lost a leg, same as some of them other poor jossers in th' hospital!"

(And this, marvellous though it sounds, is the standpoint of no small number in the legion of our Briggses.)

The motor ride was another source of gratification to Briggs. Seated beside me, the wind beating on his sightless...o...b.., he discoursed of the wonders of petrol. "Proper to take you about, them cars. W'ere are we now? 'Ave we far to run, like?" I told him we were traversing Battersea Park and that our destination was St. Pancras. It transpired that he was a stranger to London. This drive through London was, as it were, an item in his collection of experiences, to be preserved with the cross-channel voyage and the vigils in the trenches. "Shall we go by Buckingham Palace?" I told him we shouldn't; then, observing that he was disappointed, I asked the driver to make the detour. So at last I was able to inform Briggs that we were pa.s.sing Buckingham Palace: I turned his head so that he looked straight towards that architectural phenomenon. It was, of course, invisible to him. No matter. He wished to be able to boast, to his wife, that he had seen (he used that verb) the house where the King lived.

His wife--he married a month before he enlisted--had been notified of his return; but I suggested that at St. Pancras we might telegraph to her the actual hour of the train's arrival, in case she should desire to meet it. The idea commended itself to Briggs: he had not thought of such a thing: telegraphing had perhaps hardly come within his purview, at least so I surmised when, the telegraph-form before me, I asked him what he wished me to write. He began cheerily, as though dictating a letter of gossip:--"_My dear wife_--" Economy necessitated a taboo of this otherwise charming method of communication. "_Arriving Bradford five-thirty, Tom_," was the result of final boilings-down, which took so long that we nearly achieved the anticlimax of missing our train altogether.

Now at Bradford (at the end of one of the chattiest five hours I ever spent in my life) no Mrs. Briggs was perceptible. I kept my patient on the platform until every other pa.s.senger had gone: I marched him up and down the main area of the station. Each time I caught sight of a woman who looked a possible Mrs. Briggs I steered my charge into her vicinity.

In spite of a piece of information which Briggs had imparted to me on the journey--namely, that he expected soon to become a father--I was surprised that his wife had not come to the station to welcome him.

However, it was plain that Briggs himself was not particularly surprised, nor, what was more important, disappointed. Nothing could damp his eternal placidity and good humour. He proposed that from this point onward he should pursue his journey alone. "Nowt to do but git on th' tram," he said. "It's a fair step from 'ere, but I knows every inch of t' way." At all events (as of course I could not allow this) he would now act as my guide. And he did. "First to the right.... Now we're goin'

by a big watchmaker's-and-jeweller's.... Now cross t' street.... Now on th' corner over there by t' Sinnemer is w'ere we git our tram."

The tram in due course appeared, and we boarded it. "Tha mun pay thrippence only, mind," he warned me when the conductor came round.

"It's a rare long ride for thrippence." So it proved to be--through wildernesses which were half meadow and half slum, my cicerone at every hundred yards pointing out the notable features of the landscape. On our left I ought to see the so-and-so public house; on our right the football ground--I should know it by the grand-stand jutting above the palings; further on were brickworks; further still a factory which, my nose would have told me, even if Mr. Briggs had not, dealt with chemicals; then, on the skyline, a pit-head; then another; then a mining village with three different kinds of methodist church and two picture palaces; then a gap of dreary, dirty fields. And then, nearing dusk, the village where my friend lived, and where also was the terminus of the tram route.

We quitted the tram and walked down a street of those squalid brick tenements which coal-mining seems to germinate like a rash upon the earth's surface. The debris and the scaffoldings of pits were dotted about the adjacent countryside. Sooty cabbage-patches occupied the occasional inters.p.a.ces in the ranks of houses. Briggs directed me across a cinder path in one of these cabbage-patches. "See them three 'ouses at the bottom of the 'ill? The end one's mine." We approached. No sign of the wife. Surely she would be on the look-out for her husband? Also there was a sister and a brother-in-law--the latter in a prosperous way of business as a grocer near-by: Briggs had told me of them. Would not they be watching for him? I began to be anxious. Not once, but several times, I had heard of the wounded soldier returning to his home and finding no home: both home and wife had gone. (Those are bitterly tragic tales, which a realist must write some day.) Still, as we came nearer, I saw n.o.body at the cottage door. "Is th' door open?" asked Briggs. Yes, it was open. When we were at the end of the cabbage-patch, and I could discern the interior of the cottage parlour (into which the door opened direct), it became clear that three persons were there. One of them, a man, obviously the brother-in-law, came and peeped out of the window at us, and turned and spoke to his companions. Of these two, both women, one rose from her chair and the other remained seated. But none of the three came to the door.

I have met northern dourness and the inarticulate manner which is such a contrast to the gushing and noisy effusion of the south. By a paradox it is not inconsistent with the familiar conversationalism to which Briggs had treated me, a stranger. But I admit I found Briggs's family circle a little embarra.s.sing. They were respectable people: the cottage was neat and decently furnished, its occupants were sprucely dressed. I fancy they were in their best clothes; certainly their demeanour--and the aspect of the table in their midst--denoted a great occasion. This table, as I saw when I a.s.sisted Briggs up the steps into the room, had indeed borne a well-spread tea. No very acute powers of deduction were required to decide, from the crumbs on the white cloth and on the dishes, that there _had_ been bread and b.u.t.ter and jam and cake. Of these not a vestige (except the crumbs) remained. Briggs and I were an hour behindhand, and the relatives who awaited the wanderer had eaten the banquet laid to welcome him: or so it appeared. I have no doubt that all sorts of delicacies were in the cupboard; the kettle on the hob was probably on the boil; perhaps b.u.t.tered toast was in the oven. The fact remains that devastation was on the table.

However, Briggs did not see the table, and the table's state occupied me only for a fraction of a second. I was more concerned with the three people in the parlour and with their reception of my patient. The pale woman in the chair by the fire was evidently Briggs's wife. She stared at us, as we entered, but said absolutely nothing. Nor did the other and slightly younger woman, his sister, say anything. She too stared. And the man stared, and said nothing.

"Well, here we are," I announced--an imbecile a.s.sertion, but I produced it as cheerfully and matter-of-factly as I knew how. I unhooked my arm from Briggs's, and made as though to push him forward into the family group.

"Nay!" said Briggs. "I mun take my top-coat off first."

I helped him off with his coat. Not one of the three members of his family had either moved or spoken--beyond one faint murmur, not an actual word, in response to my "Here we are." But Briggs seemed to know that his folk were in the room with him, and he neither accosted them, expressed any curiosity about them, or betrayed any astonishment at their silence.

When he had got his coat off I expected him to move forward into the room. A mistake. Mine must be a hasty temperament. They don't do things like that in Yorkshire, not even when they have come home blinded from the wars. Briggs put out his hand, felt for the cottage door, half closed it, felt for a nail on the inner side of it, and carefully hung his coat thereon.