A Permanent-base man may be incapable of lumping. And even if he is not incapable, he is usually in a position to say he is—none daring to make him afraid. P.B. fatigues are highly undesirable.
"Pinching" supplies was by no means unheard of amongst them. (Amongst whom at all is it unheard-of? Australians themselves are the arch-appropriators of Army supplies.) But P.B. men do not pinch with that faculty of vulpine cunning which is clear of detection. One morning, after an all-night clearance, the A.P.M. found one of the P.B.'s sneaking back to billet in the cold grey dawn with three tins of pork and beans, two loaves of bread, six candles, imperfectly concealed. He promptly put him in the clink. There was a court-martial. The unhappy fellow got three months. Pinching in the Army should be done judiciously. It is not a moral crime. Getting caught is. At any rate, that is an intellectual, if not a moral crime.
I messed with a C.C.S. Most messes of medical officers are interesting and varied. The Colonel was a Regular—an accessible and companionable Regular. An Irishman he was, kind of heart and quick of temper; and so able that it was never dangerous for him to allow his Captains to argue with him on questions of administration, because he could always rout them: he was always right. A less able man would have taken risks in permitting argument on the subject of his administration.
He was the fiercest smoker and the ablest bridge-player I have ever known. He used to complain bitterly of the standard of bridge played by the mess in general. He put out his pipe chiefly to eat—to eat rather than to sleep. He was a hearty, but not a voluptuous, eater. His appetite was the consequence of genuine cerebration and of hard walking. He walked, unless hindered by the most inevitable obstacles, five miles a day—hard, with his two dogs and the Major. He was very deaf, and very fond of his dogs. They slept in his room, usually (one or other) on his bed. He slept little. He read and smoked in bed regularly until about two; was wakened at six; took a pipe (or two) with his tea before getting up; and sometimes—though rarely—resumed his reading in bed until eight, or spent a happy hour in earnest conversation with the dogs before rising.
His officers liked him; the Sisters loved him. To them he was indulgent. The day before the push began a Sister approached him in his office. She said that although it was her afternoon off, the Matron had advised her against tramping, lest a convoy of wounded should come in suddenly. He said: "My dear, you go."—"And how long may I be away?"—"Well, you don't go on duty until eight in the morning; as long as you're back by then, it's good enough. But mind—don't come reeling in at 8.30 with your hair down your back! That's all I ask." She left, adoring.
The Major was a mid-Victorian gentleman, with the gentlest manners and language, except when it came to talk of Germans. He got an acute attack of Wanderlust soon after I came—felt the call of Arras—and got command of a field ambulance up in the thick of it. The last I heard of him was that he was hurrying about the city under a steel helmet, succouring with his own hand those stricken down in the streets.
A French interpreter was attached to the hospital. He was a man of forty-five, with the heart of a boy of fifteen. He would sit at the gramaphone by the hour, playing his favourite music and staring into vacancy. His favourites were: a minuet of Haydn, Beethoven's Minuet in G, selections from the 1812 Overture, the Overture to Mignon, and the Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy. Everyone "pulled his leg"; everyone liked him—he was so gentle of heart, but so baffling in repartee. They called him the Pawkie Duke, a name that came to him through his comments when the facetious song of that title in the "St. Andrew's Song-Book" was being sung. He lived in a hut in hospital. Part of his duty consisted in mediation between the civilian sick and the English M.O.'s; for by international agreement they were due to treat any civilian sick who needed it. I first met Pawkie waiting in the anteroom of the operating-theatre with a distracted mother whose child was within under operation for appendicitis. She was a lovely girl of ten. The mother was weeping anxiously. Pawkie was almost in sympathetic tears himself. He made excursions of high frequency into the theatre to report progress to the mother. I went in. He came after, fumbling nervously with his hands and regarding the surgeons with a gaze of appeal. He would whisper to the Colonel, who reassured him. He tore out, colliding with the orderlies who were bearing in another "case." Seizing madame by the hands, he cried: "Bien, madame! Elle va bien! La pauvre petite fille fait de bon progrès. Les chirurgiens-major sont très adroits. Le Capitaine est le chirurgien-spécialiste. Le Colonel assiste aussi. Ça ne fait rien, madame!" And he left madame with the conviction that nothing could go wrong.
But it was pathetic to see that beautiful child, her fair face smothered under the mask. At the end, when the wound was stitched, the surgeon took her up as gently as though she were his own offspring and carried her to her mother, and so on to the ward. There she stayed two weeks, tended by him with the affection of an elder brother.
On the eve of the push, during the preparatory and retaliatory bombardment, the theatre was a ghastly chamber. An abbatoir it was, five hours after the arrival of the convoys, when the preparation of the cases for operation had been completed. Five "tables" were in continuous use. On "taking-in" night the surgeons invariably worked through to daylight. This is very exhausting, so exhausting that they never worked continuously. At about two o'clock they adjourned to the mess for a rest and a meal—a solid meal of bacon and eggs and coffee. For the push there came reinforcements—teams, as they were called. They amounted to eight fresh surgeons, ten Sisters, and fifty additional orderlies.
The Colonel called his M.O.'s together in the anteroom the Sabbath before the attack, and gave them plain words of warning and advice. In a push they were not to be too elaborate; it would lead to injustice. Better twelve "abdominals" done roughly but safely than four exquisitely finished operations. In the former case all twelve would be rendered safe as far as the base; in the latter, the remaining eight would probably die on their hands.... The examining officers in the reception-room must come to a complete agreement with the surgeons as to what manner of "case" it was imperative to operate upon before evacuation to the base. There must be waste of neither surgical time nor surgical energy in operating upon "cases" that would carry to the base without it—and so on....