Cats

November 1916

By a Girl Orderly

To the outsider and the uninitiated, the 3rd L.G.H. is all that its title implies, but to some at least of the dwellers within its gates it is nothing more nor less than a home for cats of every persuasion – cats with four legs, cats with two, striped cats, plain cats, the domestic cat, and the undomesticated cat – but it is of the first mentioned we would write; the second class is apt to be viewed with a jaundiced eye (we have suffered at their hands!), and so on to the third and fourth generation as it were.

Now if any cat of the feline tribe requires a home, it simply leaps the railings, and rejoices in fruitful searchings in pig-buckets by day and in mouse hunts by night, varied by slumbers long and deep in sequestrated spots, preferably under a hut, thus being immune from the activities of the playful R.A.M.C. Should any cat be wearied of this world, but wishful to enter its Nirvana minus the sin of self-destruction, it merely has to get under the feet of any dispenser on any dark night when he is roused from his slumbers to work, and, by the light of the electric torch that he invariably carries (for dispensers are men of infinite resource and sagacity), it is thenceforward a marked cat, and may be safely posted “Missing, believed killed,” on the day following.

Naturally, there are one or two outstanding characters in this happy fellowship, the most noted being the Guard Cat – a tabby of slightly sandy hue, who mounts guard at the main gate. Of course, there is an R.A.M.C. guard as ornament and to open the gate. Tabby does all the rest, meeting one well outside the precincts with tail erect and martial bearing, and woe betide the prospective visitor who has no satisfactory answer to its challenging “Per-er-ow-w.?” On leaving, the same watchful query detains one – “Miow-ou?” “All serene; pass, friend.”

Dogs, of course, are barred by this most active sentry, which is another point on which it scores off the R.A.M.C., who have been known to encourage visitors of this description. The Brown Residential Dog is tolerated, but allowed no liberties in the shape of visitors, leave, etc. With our own eyes we beheld a canine friend utterly routed with one well-directed blow between the eyes from Tabby (“a fair knock aht,” in the vernacular), and the B.R.D. was hustled home, possibly to the guard room, and all in the twinkling of an eye. An R.P. band and red cap are surely the lowest reward of such vigilance?

Who does not know the Mad Cat of the Corridors? Which of the Girl Orderlies has not been scared stiff in the long black corridors on night duty by the sound of the heavy padded feet and a stealthy Presence that springs from nowhere to just beyond the lonely traveller, and lies in wait, with gleaming eyes and twitching tail, to follow one in a zigzag fashion and with a low growlish noise that raises the hair and lends wings to one’s feet, till one reaches the Wardmaster’s room in an hysterical, semi-petrified state, to burble incoherently of the tiger that has escaped from heaven knows where, and is waiting round the corner to devour the unfortunate girl, and on turning has beheld the Mad Cat, a lean, dark creature, with the evil eye and tiger stripes and tail of stupendous length!

There are others of equal note, but the Editor looms in the distance, and, fortunately perhaps, “space does not permit – “ etc., etc!