Winter 1915-1916
... By one who has never been there, but has read a lot about it in the papers.
I opened one eye and asked for a cigarette. I opened the other eye. I found myself in a long, low room - full of beds. An orderly was bending over me with a lighted match. He asked me where I was hit. I knew that was an old catch. If I told him in what part of my anatomy I had got it, he would say he meant in what part of the firing line had I been wounded - and vice versa. So I said 'In the leg at Hooge' - and I scored off him.
This orderly, by the way, proved to be an American of no little standing in financial circles. As president of the Eagle Chewing Gum Merger he had found himself in London when the war began and enlisted at once in the R.A.M.C. But orderlies are the most extraordinary race of men. Two others who waited on me proved to have been in civilian life at opposite poles of the social scale (if a scale can be said to be bounded by poles). One was a ratcatcher and the other the third son of a Norwegian count. They worked together like brothers. After the extraordinary antecedents of all the orderlies, I found the outstanding fact about a military hospital was the stream of distinguished visitors who came in. It would be inadvisable for me in the public interest to name them here, but I may say that in my first forenoon I had four calls from the Secretary of State for War, who always leant over the end of the bed and told me to carry on; and there shoals of others. Their visits were always a complete surprise, but we generally had time to get out the red carpet and warn our press photographer. Cheerfulness and cigarette smoke make up the atmosphere. No non-smokers were allowed in our hospital at all. There was a special ward for them at the end of the garden. Great difficulty has been experienced from time to time in wedging in the meals without suspending the cigarette consumption. The Chancellor of the Exchequer happened to look in the day after he had imposed the new Budget tax on tobacco. He was immensely pleased, and just kept walking about the ward nodding and murmuring 'Carry on.'
One thing worried me horribly. I had lost all my kit. I found myself to be arrayed in a nice suit of blue pyjamas, but that was all I had. It was a fearful dilemma - and, knowing as I did that it was the sort of thing that could not possibly have happened to anyone before, it was difficult to see a way out of it. I might lie here for weeks - so near and yet so far - unable to communicate with my wife who lives in Camden Town on an allowance of £1,500 a year that I made to her when I enlisted. Somehow I must contrive to borrow sixpence for a telegram, and (like the Germans) time was operating against me; as if I waited much longer it would have to be ninepence. I did not like the idea of borrowing money off people, especially after all the kindness they had shown me. And I had nothing left that I could pawn.
There is not much else to report about this hospital. It was really very much as you would have expected it to be, and quite full of the usual coincidences. The man in the bed to the left of me, for instance, not only had thirty-seven shrapnel bullets in him (which was the record for the hospital), but also turned out to be my cousin Percy, whom I had last seen seven years before in Buenos Ayres. I had no idea he had enlisted. I borrowed a quid off him. Then I turned expectantly to the bed on the other side, and was not disappointed. The patient turned out to be a Frenchman whom I had met in February on the summit of the Hartmannweilerskopf (when on a visit to the French lines). But there is no need to dwell upon these discoveries. I know they are not peculiar to myself.
After all, one military hospital is very like another.
BERTRAM SMITH
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