The weather is fine, and under our tents we don't feel the heat of the sun. After the monotony of khaki here, there and everywhere, to which one gets accustomed on the veldt, the colours one sees here are quite enlivening. To begin with, place aux dames the nurses are arrayed in grey, white and red, and the patients who arrive in torn, worn, dirty or bloody khaki, surrender all their warlike habiliments to an orderly, have a bath and then "blossom in purple and red"—pyjamas, or in pinks, stripes or spots.
The food is very good here, and, as Tommy says, there is bags of it. "Bags" is the great Army word for abundance. It is used apparently without discrimination, and so one hears of bags of jam, bags of beer, bags of bags, bags of fun, or anything else in or out of reason.
For a student of dialect this hospital opens a large field. It is a regular Babel at times, our Sister speaking a superior Irish and the orderly an inferior brogue. In our tent are a Scotch, two Welsh, a Dorset and a Sussex Yeoman. In the next tent are some regulars of the Northumberland Fusiliers and Yorkshire Light Infantry, and a true-bred cockney Hussar, and their speech requires careful attention if the listener wishes to understand it, I can assure you. A few Kaffirs talking a bastard Dutch and an old Harrovian, who stutters like an excited soda water syphon, completes the Babel in my immediate neighbourhood.
The Irish orderly, Mick, by the way, is one of the most wonderful and plausible fellows I have met out here. To say he could talk a donkey's hind leg off would be a mild way of describing his excessive volubility—he would chatter a centipede's legs off. Often when he comes in, with another orderly's broom, to make a pretence of sweeping the tent out, and leaning on the stick, starts retailing stories of mystery and imagination, I lay down the book I am trying to read, and closing my eyes, drift into the land of true romance.
It is a land uninhabited by ladyes fayre in the general way, for the dramatis personæ usually comprise "th' ortherly corp'ril"; "th' sargint of th' gyard"; "th' qua'thermasther, an' a low blaygyard he waz"; "th' gin'ril o' th' disthrict"; "a lif'tint in 'H' Company"; and other military personages, with "th' ortherly room" or a "disthrict coort-martial" thrown in. If I had only had a phonograph I would preserve them, and when I get home, have them set up in type, tastily bound, and announced as "Tales from the Ill, by R—. K—.," and then live a life of opulent ease on the proceeds thereof.
"Th' sisther," as he calls her, says he is a dreadful man, and from her point of view I don't think she is far away from the truth. He argues about everything, and is always blaming his fellow orderlies. Still, it is the dreadful men who are invariably so entertaining.
I have just heard that a friend, Trooper Bewes, a cheery fellow of the Devons, has succumbed to his wound. Christmas Eve, forsooth! His chum was shot through the stomach, and died on the veldt. Poor fellow, he (the chum) was always swallowing with avidity any rumour about our going home—perhaps he was too keen, and ironical fate stepped in. It's a hard Christmas Box for his poor people, is it not?
We are debating whether to hang our socks up or not. If I do, and get something inside, it will probably be a scorpion. I found one in my boot a few days ago. The latest from our cheerful town pessimist, is "Don't be surprised if you are out another twelve months." Our Harrovian friend has summed up our feelings very aptly by stuttering, "If I had a bigger handkerchief I'd weep."