e
enlistment of so considerable a company of able-bodied males. What,
exactly, we did with ourselves during the long hours when ambulances
were _not_ arriving, he failed to understand. I suppose he pictured us
twiddling our thumbs in some kind of cosy club-room situated in the
neighbourhood of the front door, from whence we could be summoned as
soon as another convoy hove in sight.

The truth of the matter is quite otherwise. Arrivals of wounded, even
when they occur several times a day (I have known six hundred patients
enter the hospital in forty-eight hours), are far from being our chief
preoccupation. Admittedly they take precedence of other duties. The
message, "Convoy coming! Every man wanted in the main hall!" is the
signal for each member of the unit who is not engaged in certain
exempted sections to drop his work, whatever it is, and proceed smartly
to report to the sergeant-in-charge. The telephone has notified us of
the hour at which the ambulances may be expected; the hospital's
internal telephone system has passed on the tidings to the various
officials concerned; and, five minutes before the patients are due, all
the orderlies likely to be required must "down tools," so to speak, and
line-up at the door. They come streaming from every corner of the
hospital and of its grounds. Some have been working in wards, some have
been pushing trollies in the corridors, some have been shovelling coke,
some have been toiling in the cookhouse or stores, some have been
shifting loads of bedding to the fumigator, some have been on "sanitary
fatigue," some have been cleaning windows or whitewashing walls, some
have been writing or typing documents, some have been spending their
rest-hour in slumber or over a game of billiards. Whatever they were
doing, they must stop doing it at the word of command.

If the convoy be a large one, its advent may even mean, for the
orderlies, the dread announcement, "All passes stopped." The luckless
wight whose one afternoon-off in the week this happens to be, and who
has probably arranged to tryst with a lady friend, finds, at the gate,
that he is turned back by the sentry. In vain he displays his pass,
properly signed, stamped and dated: the telephone has warned the sentry
(or "R.M.P."--Regimental Military Policeman) that the passes have been
countermanded. Until the convoy has been dealt with, the pass is so much
waste paper, and the unfortunate orderly's inamorata will look for him
an