d behold him not. How many painful misunderstandings this "All passes
stopped" law has given rise to, one shudders to guess.

But indeed no war-hospital orderly ever arranges any appointment without
the proviso that he is liable to break it. The folk who imagine that the
hospital orderly enjoys a "cushy job" (to use the appropriate
vernacular) seldom make sufficient allowance for this painful aspect of
it. The ordinary soldier in training in an English camp has his evenings
free, and certain other free times, which are nearly as sure as the
sun's rising. The hospital orderly is _never_--in theory at any
rate--off duty. His free moments are regarded not as a right but as a
favour: no freedom, at any time, can be guaranteed. He is liable to be
called on in the middle of the night, or at the instant when he is going
off duty, or when at a meal, or when resting, or when on the point of
walking out in pursuance of the gentle art of courtship. And he must
respond, instanter, or he will find that he has earned the C.B.--which
in this instance means not Companion of the Bath, but Confined to
Barracks, a punishment as hard to bear as the cruel "keeping in" of our
school-days.

Without presuming to compare either the importance or the onerousness of
the hospital orderly's work with that of the soldier capable of going to
the front to fight, I would here add that the critic who watches the
stretcher-carrying and thinks it a pity that able-bodied males should be
wasted on it, is doing the system (not to mention the men themselves) an
injustice. For the men whom he sees are not, as a matter of fact,
able-bodied, even though muscular enough to stand this short physical
effort. Excitable old gentlemen who believe that they can decide at a
glance whether a man is medically fit, and write to the Press about the
"shirkers" they think they have detected, were of the opinion, long
since, that the R.A.M.C. should be combed out. Certain journals made a
great feature of this proposal. Whatever may be the case elsewhere, I
can only say that as far as our unit was concerned it had already,
months before the newspaper agitation, been combed out five times; and
this in spite of the fact that, at the period when I enlisted, our
Colonel declined to look at any recruit who was not either over age or
had been rejected for active service. The unit was thus made up, even
then, of elderly men and of "crocks." (This was before the start of the
Derby Sch