Besides my wife and daughter, there was a Sister-in-Charge, and, when needed, an additional professional nurse, a staff of masseuses which varied in number in accordance with the nature of the cases sent to us, and four or five resident V.A.D.'s, including the night nurses. In a house in such an isolated position as ours it was not possible for the V.A.D.'s to live at home and come in for their duty hours.
I suppose the conventional cynic will expect me to say that I found out how much more quarrelsome, jealous, and feline is a community of women than one of men. Though I amused myself very much by watching how women work in association, I am bound to say that I saw nothing which led me to any such conclusion. I have seen plenty of men's quarrels in offices, in clubs, in the common rooms of colleges, at schools, and still more, perhaps, in mess-rooms and barracks, and I am bound to say that, according to my experience, my sex is quite as bad as, and, on the whole, rather worse than, women at the communal quarrel. Women are a little less noisy in their quarrels, and little more ingenious, but that is as far as I should care to generalise.
"They did not let you see."—That will not do as an explanation, for I am sure that after the first seven or eight months, the ladies of the staff came to ignore me completely, or to regard me rather as a part of the furniture. Consequently, I saw them in what, if they had been men, one might have called their shirt-sleeves. When you see hard-worked and anxious people, as they come down to breakfast in the morning, when they rush in to lunch, and when they sink, tired, into their chairs at dinner, you have a pretty good opportunity for finding out all about them. Under such conditions they cannot keep up the veil of convention and of company manners. However, I cannot go into all these details, much as I should like to, but must give only a general verdict.
I ended up my four and a half years as a parlour-boarder in a semi- convent with a respect for women and their work, which had always been very high, made still higher. If perhaps I found women a little less sensitive than I thought, I certainly found them a great deal more sensible, and, of course, as I suppose is the universal experience, a great deal less easily shocked by things that ought not to shock them than they are supposed to be. I mean by this that women are much less afraid to look life full in the face and much more willing to understand and to pardon, than is supposed. Also, I came to the conclusion that women, though great disciplinarians, and often hard upon each other, are not essentially merciless.
They are certainly, on the whole, less lazy than men, which is probably a misfortune. I think Matthew Arnold was right when he spoke of women being "things that move and breathe mined by the fever of the soul." The fever of the soul, especially in a Sister, who, as is the case with most of them, was grossly overworked in the hospital where she was trained, is apt to prove a great evil.
If I learned a good deal about women at the hospital and if the result of that learning was respect and admiration, I acquired an equally great respect and admiration for the British soldier. I had always loved those "contemptible regiments" who, as Sir Thomas Browne says, "will die at the word of a sergeant," but I loved them still more when I saw their good-natured, unostentatious way of life. They were, above all things, easy and sympathetic livers. Almost the only thing that shocked and disgusted them was being treated as heroes. Dr. Johnson talked about the "plebeian magnanimity of the British common soldier" and meant the right thing, though, in truth, there was nothing plebeian in the said magnanimity,—nothing which would not have been worthy of the highest birth and the highest breeding.
But the hospital did not raise my admiration merely for the soldier. It raised it equally for the British working-man, who composed by far the larger part of our patients. Ours, remember, was a soldiers' hospital, not an officers'. We had, I think, in the whole course of our hospital not more than four men who had been public-school boys or University men. All the rest were labourers or artisans. When the hospital doors closed, I respected the English working-man as much as ever, and added to that respect a love and sympathy which I may record, but shall not attempt to explain or to express in detail. I could fill a book with stories and studies of our friends, for so they became, and so they still remain.
My wife is constantly in touch with her old patients, and this does not mean applications for help or for work, but letters and visits of pleasure. That is good, but what is even better is that we constantly come across references to the Newlands feeling, for around it quickly grew up an indefinable esprit de corps. For example, on the day on which I write these pages, one of our local newspapers contains a letter from a Yorkshireman who had somehow seen an article in the aforesaid paper in regard to some Red Cross work done by my wife. He talks of the happy hours he spent at Newlands Corner, "hours which will live for ever in my mind." That, of course, is commonplace enough and sounds trivial, but it is repeated often enough to provoke a sense of true communal fellowship.
One of the things with which I think my wife and I were specially pleased about the hospital was the rapid way in which this sense of esprit de corps, i.e., the public-school feeling, grew up. After the first month or two, patients talked quite seriously and candidly about "the old hospital." Again and again men told us that they should never forget Newlands. Like the true Englishmen they were, they partly loved Newlands because of the beauty of the scenery. The Englishman, though generally insensible of, or at any rate irresponsive to, the arts, is never irresponsive to a view. (John Stuart Mill's Autobiography contains, by the way, a curious passage in regard to this point.) I remember my wife telling me, the day after she had admitted a very bad case, that the patient had said to her, "I am sure I shall get well here, Commandant. It's such beautiful scenery."
But no more of the hospital here. I live in the hope that some day I may write its history, and may be able to say something which will not be open to the charge of, "Oh! Another boring book about the War!" As I conceive it, my hospital book will be an analysis of the mind and character of the British working-man with his defensive armour off, and not an attempt to give any views on military or medical reform and so forth.