Often I said to myself in fear for him, ‘Whom the orderlies love die young’—for the orderlies adored Jock, but the adapted proverb did not come true, for he is walking about now and ‘enjoying life fine to make up for all the months in bed—not that I suffered so much at all, Nurse.’
This is a happy story, but we saw sad ones.
Death is just an incident in hospital life. Alas! one sometimes forgets that it is all-important to the dying. A household seems to hold its breath when somebody dies; a ward continues its automatic routine. There is pity—much of it—but it is a common-sense pity, that accepts death as just an inevitable happening to be finished and then forgotten.
I remember so well the night when old Sergeant Meadows died. He had only been in the ward for three days, so that his personality had had no chance to impress us. All the men settled down to sleep except Harman, who had suddenly gone mad. He shrieked if anyone went near him, tried to push us away, then to blow us away. A hypodermic of morphia seemed to produce little effect on him except that he was a shade quieter; he did not sleep but remained sitting up in bed, watchful and terribly alert.
Meanwhile the poor old sergeant was dying. Nothing could be done for him. Morton, the orderly, always pitiful, came and looked at him.
‘Well,’ he said philosophically, ‘this is a queer night we’re having. A man in the other ward tells me ’e’s been seein’ rabbits. It’s too much! I just says “This must stop. There’s too many seein’ rabbits to-night.” I knew a man what saw red, white, and blue rats—had ’em proper, ’e did.’
Morton sighed. He was a gentle soul, capable of infinite tenderness and patience, as many orderlies are. They are, one sometimes thinks, gentler than women, less conventional, and stereotyped in their kindness.
‘Poor man!’ Morton murmured. ‘A good old soul. It’s queer how little one thinks of it. When the young ones die it comes worse on one.’
A few minutes afterwards the sergeant was dead. Unused to death, I hardly realised it. At once preparations were made for his laying-out and subsequent removal. There is a routine about death as about birth. The immensity of the spiritual change is obscured by the methodical functions of material life. Yet death is the supreme adventure.
It seemed sad for the old man to have met this great adventure among strangers, to go forth silently, without tears or prayers or love from us who watched. Yet I think this quiet, unemotional passing is dignified. Very soon afterwards the orderlies came with a stretcher and the Union Jack for pall, and so the old man left us. His body went to the mortuary, and his soul—surely, ‘his soul goes marching on.’ And all the time the other men slept like weary children. Only Harman sat up, still awake and watchful in his terrible nervous tension.